Original artwork, not a still
Brighton Beach Memoirs · 1984
How am I going to become a writer if I don't know how to suffer? Actually, I'd give up writing if I could see a naked girl while I was eating ice cream.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
The speaker starts with a serious-sounding worry about the suffering supposedly needed to become a writer. The next sentence promptly trades that ambition for pleasure. This abrupt change punctures the grand artistic pose, making the stated commitment to writing seem comically easy to displace.
Context reviewed
