If one is fashionable for the greater part of one’s career, one will produce second-class work. Perhaps by chance one will arrive at being a success but this means that one is a follower and not an innovator. An artist should lead, blaze trails.
“Learning to write publishable material is essentially a social process. It’s like learning to say, ‘Oh not so bad, not so bad,’ when someone asks you how you are, rather than actually telling them anything.”