[Being a writer is] an awful curse to wish on anybody — from the day you begin you never completely relax again.… Even those years I threw away, when the book reviewers were giving me up, I was always worrying about writing, wishing I could find the way to get started again and wanting to push on beyond where I had been.
— Budd Schulberg, The Disenchanted (1950)
The speaker is Manley Halliday, a character based on F. Scott Fitzgerald in his cracked-up, broke-down Hollywood years.
Image: Detail, F. Scott Fitzgerald, June 4, 1937 (photo by Carl van Vechten). Fitzgerald is 40 years old in this photo. He died December 21, 1940, at age 44.
