T. Roosevelt on writing

You touch on one of what I believe to be the most serious obstacles in the way of doing good literary work in the present generation, when you speak of the press and bustle of city life, and especially of the tendency to write "timely" articles, and the like. It is not necessary to be a mere recluse in order to do good work as a poet, a novelist, or even as a historian or a scholar; but it is absolutely necessary to be able to have the bulk of one's time to one's self, so that it can be spent on the particular study needed. Nowadays it is rather difficult to get such leisure, and indeed it can be gotten only ba a man of some means and of great determination of character, if he has any widespread popularity.

Even more important and more harmful is the fact that the enourmous increase in the half-educated reading public, and in the half-educated caterers to this reading public, tends to divert every manh capable of doing good work from that good work; because as my own experience tends to show, one's literary work is very apt to be remunerated in inverse proportion to its value.

Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to George Dewey, February 1898