A year ago, Mark Pilgrim was fired because his boss wanted him to stop writing in his weblog. His reply was, in part:

Writers will write because they can’t not write. Repeat that over and over to yourself until you get it. Do you know someone like that? Someone who does what they do, not for money or glory or love or God or country, but simply because it’s who they are and you can’t imagine them being any other way?