This is from “Making a Literary Life,” by Carolyn See:
“Your ego is a big, messy, undisciplined, anxiety-ridden dog. It barks and whines and pees on the floor and sheds all over the furniture and takes nips at passing strangers and goes crazy when it see another dog that might be bigger or smarter or prettier. This dog — at least in my experience — is untrainable. The only thing you can do is try to keep it on a fairly short leash.”
“I’ve seen writers misbehave, and God knows I’ve misbehaved myself. I’ve watched distinguished authors show up at conferences only to storm off, saying: ‘I’m used to at least being the keynote speaker!’ Or, ‘I’m not used to being seated below the salt!’”
“And I’ve seen writers pitch hissy fits because their eight hundred words on county welfare have been edited down to seven hundred or some phrases have been changed or their piece appears ‘in the back of the magazine’ or ‘below the fold’ in a newspaper, when in actual fact they should be sobbing with joy that they managed to get into print at all. But big, shedding, slobbering dogs don’t possess humility or irony or any sense of what we are pleased to call ‘reality.’”
