Exactly

Introducing her column on the art of fiction, novelist Louise Doughty says:

Some years ago, I was sitting in a café with a writer friend. He had just come from giving a talk to a group of sixth-formers and one of them had asked, "Why did you become a writer?"

"You know what?" he said to me, stirring his cappuccino, "I gave them some flannel about the joy of language, but actually, the real reason I became a writer was so that I could move to London and sit in cafés with other writers and talk about why I became a writer."