Writing in a magic house

"No one tried to dissuade me from writing; they simply talked about what I would do to make a living. Writing, in their eyes, could be done when one came home from work. It was not that they did not respect writing. It was that they saw it as having nothing to do with real life... I was not at all interested in making a living. I thought then that my destiny could be just like Emily Dickinson's. I could stay alone in my little house and write. Of course as a young girl believing in magic I did not think in concrete terms about how I would acquire the house, the means to survive. I thought it would happen like magic. I let no one dissuade me from my dream of becoming a writer."

(from Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, by bell hooks)