Hannah Kolni asked Daniel Quinn:

When or if you have ever felt discouraged, uncertain, or lost from your sense of value or purpose, what has helped you get back on track, to continue to create and give what it is you uniquely offer the world?

Daniel Quinn It feels strange, but I must say that I have no recondite or complex answer to your profound question. I have of course had occasion to feel the things you mention—discouraged, uncertain, lost from my sense of value or purpose. Although each of those feelings is different, my reaction to each has always been the same: I try again—with something DIFFERENT. No matter how many things you’ve tried, there is ALWAYS something you haven’t tried; no single lifetime is long enough to exhaust all the possibilities. Imagine, for example, a novelist whose work has been rejected 743 times; doesn’t he do the sensible thing and take up welding or wood carving? The English author John Creasey didn’t. He went on to try a 744th time—with something different—and sold his first novel. Like me, Creasey could only advise: "Don’t quit. Try again—but this time do SOMETHING DIFFERENT." The something different he found HE could do was good enough for almost 600 more novels he subsequently wrote and published.

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