It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

In one letter [to director Tony Guthrie], I told him that Candid had done bad things to me, I wasn’t working…a few months later he was in New York and we met for lunch. As I came in the restaurant door, a voice on my right side said, ‘Stop the nonsense. Get on with new work, get on with it today.’
…a few days after that, I spent the evening with Elena and Edmund Wilson. During the evening we talked of a man we both knew and Edmund asked why he didn’t write anymore. I mumbled something about writing blocks…
Edmund said, “Foolishness. A writer writes. That’s all there is to it.”
…the hardheaded sense of that was good stuff. But it did not happen a few days after I saw Guthrie. Last week I came back from Edmund’s funeral and sat thinking…The next morning I went through old diaries of the many times I had spent with the Wilsons and found that ‘A writer writes. That’s all there is to it,’ came almost two years after my lunch with Guthrie. But it is true that the next day after Edmund said it I went to work on Toys in the Attic.

Pentimento, by Lillian Hellman, p. 205