“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”
That’s what William Faulkner said in 1950 while accepting the Nobel Prize for literature, and he should know, because “even Faulkner had a day job.”
(For those interested, you can read Faulkner’s entire Nobel speech here.)