What I told myself is I want to do it, I’ll try do it, the limiting factor is the amount of energy and spirit I have to continuously fail. And writing, not just publishing, writing itself is a process of continous failure. I mean every time I write a sentence, it’s not the pristine sentence I had in my head, it’s a failure. Every time you submit something and it doesn’t come back with, you know, “yes banana, we’ll give you money for this”, it’s failure. So it really is, it’s very easy to quit. But what I kept telling myself is every day I write, every day I don’t quit, I beat the thousand people that did quit that day, and I beat the ten thousand people who didn’t even try that day.
Greg Van Eekhout in Adventures in Scifi Publishing: AISFP 48.