"Everyone envies everyone else."He also wrote a poem, 'On Being Twenty-Six':
"I feared these present years, The middle twenties, When deftness disappears, And each event is Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt, And turned to drought."Quentin Blake said: "As soon as I knew something was intended for print, I tightened up."
Hitchens wrote, embrace the doubt and comparison:
"The main thing as I keep saying, I never tire of saying is, to keep testing yourself against other writers who are better than you. That’s what qualifies one as a writer I think, permanently running the risk of having to say I don’t know why I bother."He elaborated on this:
"[With George Orwell] you don’t get the sense for example when you’re reading Proust or Nebokhov or George Eliot that you shouldn’t be in the writing business."
