Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
Interpretation
Believing you are a writer before being published is naive and can lead to painful disillusionment.
In this quote, Dan Simmons suggests that having a self-image as a writer or poet without the validation of publication can be an innocent but ultimately misplaced belief. This naivety, akin to youthful notions of immortality, can lead to a harsh awakening when faced with the realities of the writing world, emphasizing that the journey to recognition and success is fraught with challenges and potential disappointment.
In practice
During a creative writing workshop, one might use this quote to discuss the challenges and realities of becoming a published author.
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed
People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don't know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.
Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth...all those glorious words.
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
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