The artist’s life is the hardest life of all?

“Everything up in the air and working hopeless”

Sometimes I think the entire point of my books and this newsletter is simply to convince people that being a writer or an artist is really hard. It’s hard, you guys! It’s deeply engaging and satisfying and most of us wouldn’t want to do anything else—but, man, is it hard.

So of course I was delighted to come across the following quote in a book I was reading last week, from the British painter Lucian Freud: