Bitter words, but true

The India Uncut blog hit the typewriter on the keys:

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to take part in a Q&A with the participants of a writing workshop at the Kala Ghoda Lit Fest. I made pretty much the same point there: writing is not a profession. You can take up medicine or engineering or law or management, and you can be a mediocre doctor or engineer or lawyer or manager and earn a perfectly decent living. But if you’re a novelist in India, you have to be among the top five or ten in the country to be able to pay your rent from that. Literary prizes and foreign advances are like a lottery: writing a good book is a necessary condition to get them, but is far from sufficient. And if you don’t hit that lottery, you’d better have another source of income— which, of course, eats into your writing time, and makes it all the more difficult.
So, if you want to be a writer, ask yourself what drives you. If it’s anything other than the love of writing— money, success, fame, lit groupies— don’t do it.

Rico says he doesn't have any of that stuff (yet, hopefully) either, especially the 'lit groupies'...