Eine schöne Rede, 1986 von einem gewissen Richard Mitchell, Underground Grammarian, gehalten:

I think of writing as being, if anything, against my life. And then it occurred to me that maybe that’s not so bad, and if I were to suggest writing to another human being—a very bad act, I think—but if I were to suggest it to another human being, I would suggest it because that human being needs something against his life, something to change it in some drastic way, by which I would mean, his life was not in good condition, and he had damn well better write, to destroy it. And it is with that in mind that I speak.

You are writers, or would-be writers. I would remind you first of this: I do know that in some cities, there is a shortage of taxicabs. And in some cities in America there is a shortage of men’s rooms; this is probably true of women’s rooms, too, but I don’t notice that shortage. I can think of numerous things of which there is a shortage. Of writers, there is no shortage. I do not hear people going around in the streets, saying, "You know what we need in this country’s more writers!"

We live in a time when writing—writing has become too common, too widespread among us. I expect any day to meet a man at a cocktail party and ask him what he does and he says, "I’m a writer," and I ask him, "Oh, what have you written?" and he answers, "Close cover before striking."

Or "HOT." "HOT." I know the man who wrote "HOT," I wonder if he’s the same man who wrote "COLD." Or a man who takes his brushes and paints on a door, "MEN." A writer? Yes! We have people who write in manuals, people who write instructions, people who write speeches for other people to deliver, people who write wheedling, conniving invitations to us to spend money for one thing or another—people who write their initials on the oak tree, I suppose. We have to start understanding this business of "writer."

You remember Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case? That was about a novelist who had run out his string, and I think it was Cromelin who wrote a spoof of it in The New Yorker called "A Burnt-Out Ace," and that was about a man who went around to cocktail parties brooding, and introducing himself as a disappointed writer, and it turned out he was a sky-writer; he wrote "Pepsi-Cola" as one of his very, uh, great works.

Now, if you take up writing seriously, I can’t promise this, but I can hope this: I hope that it will make you profoundly unhappy. I hope that every day will bring you some bad news from the frontier of that unknown territory in which you work. I hope every day you rise up from your desk and say, "God, what a fool I was yesterday!" So that you can say that again tomorrow. And thus write against your life.

There was a very popular whoring book around lately—I don’t know, it hasn’t been for some time, I can’t remember when, it was called "I’m Okay"—uh, something—"I’m Okay, You’re Okay." Oh, what pleasant news. Believe me, you’ll never lose money by telling people how nice they are. You’ll never lose money by telling people, "Hey! Don’t worry about your miserable rotten behavior and your perversions, and your lies, and your thefts! You’re okay!" No one will blame you for this, and you may actually do quite well. I don’t know about you—I suspect, but I don’t know about you—however I will tell you this: I am not okay. I am not okay. I do not carefully define my terms when I think. I do not test, rigidly, as though I were a stranger, every one of my quaint and curious notions, prejudices, and beliefs, I do not do this, I am not okay. I lie. Whether I lie to you is none of your damn business; I lie to me, as to what I am and how it is in me. And I am not okay. (And I don’t think you’re okay either, but all I can do is suspect that.)

I will tell you this—and I will tell you this as a command, because you can walk out now before you hear this command, but I’m going to give you this command:

Don’t—shine.

Burn.