“What the young writer of today should contemplate is a dual profession – and incidentally it would be the best thing in the world for his tortured creativeness to be forced to touch some non-literary world, forced to remember what saner folk are daily up to. Let the young Balzac or Byron not only wear his elbows shiny at his desk, but let him with equal assiduity learn another and slightly more lucrative calling. But I would like him to keep out of advertising, journalism, and the teaching of literature, if possible, because they are too much akin to his writing. No, let him become a doctor or a grocer, a mail-flying aviator or a carpenter, a farmer or a bacteriologist, a priest or a Communist agitator, and with the two professions together, he make make a living … provided any of us will be ‘making a living,’ a couple of decades from now.”
—Sinclair Lewis, Yale Literary Magazine, 1936
(Hat tip: @GenerationMeh.)