“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is dangerous to use generalities. You are not popular novelists. Popular novelists are also individuals, with a certain amount of creative talent. Many of them feel almost the prisoner of abilities that will only extend so far, and no further. The mass attention and the money, that at times you either envied them or scorned them for, is often a badge to them of their own inadequacies—a compensation that is held a curse, so do not deal in generalities of that kind.

The shoddy, superficial, popular novelist is acclaimed. The original creator is scoffed at. Ruburt could not stand ridicule, and so took a proud retreat. He now understands that retreat denies the responsiveness natural to the body, mind, and spirit.

[...] Had he not delved into deeper questions, he could very well have been the novelist, going no further than a novelist can into the nature of personality or motivation.

[...] Novelists create heroes who must overcome obstacles. [...]

[...] A novelist, being himself or herself writing a book, will nevertheless imaginatively live the actions of all of its characters—the villain, the hero, the madman, the saint or whatever—and a true creative gestalt is involved. [...]

[...] The novelist, the science fiction writer—these were male images needed in the time of his youth.

[...] A novelist may indeed maintain seclusion from the world—and while the world may not like it, it doesn’t care enough, except for a few publicity seekers, to track him down.

[...] The American novelist was laid on as a more acceptable and practical framework. [...]

[...] He would be a novelist and a poet, as the conditions of his happy existence, of his joyful existence, or he would not operate naturally.

Many novelists, say, of some considerable ability in writing, flesh out those same stories with characters only a bit more mature, and are considered quite serious artists. [...]

[...] If you were, or if Ruburt was, a conventional Philip Roth, a novelist, safely within that framework, or if he were willing to set himself up as an “occult” mistress of the spirit, then you would have publicity galore.

Popular novelists and writers are above all things people of their times. [...]

(Late yesterday afternoon my pendulum told me that Jane’s symptoms stemmed from her feeling that she had failed to become a successful “straight” writer—a novelist, poet, essayist, et al.; that she felt she had failed as the serious writer she had always dreamed of becoming, that the psychic work represented a turning down a wrong path; that actually, basically, the psychic work represented failure to her rather than success. [...]

[...] My first novel had just been published in paperback, and all my energies were channeled into becoming a good novelist and poet. [...]