" The uneducated writer may successfully tell the stories of the people around him, may set down their longings and sufferings in comic or deeply moving or awe-inspiring ways; and if he is a self-educated writer, one who reads books, goes to good movies, and listens intently to the stories he hears among his friends and fellow workers, he may even become a subtle and original storyteller. But he will almost certainly remain a sort of primitive, that is, a kind of folk writer; he has difficulty becoming a virtuoso, one of those writers whose fictions impress us not only by their truth to life but also by their brilliance, their value as performance. "

― John Gardner , On Becoming a Novelist