Writing lesson: on talent

 Mario Vargas Llosa said that talent, for novelists, means years of discipline. There are no child prodigies among novelists.

I think only those who come to literature as they might to religion … have what it takes to really become writers and transcend themselves in their works.

 

I’ve heard that bit of advice from many writers — from poets who wrote like angels and from newspaper guys who did not resemble angels in any way.

• Source: Mario Varga Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, translated by Natasha Wimmer; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p. 13.