From the book “The Courage to Create” by Rollo May
The fact that talent is plentiful but passion is lacking seems to me to be fundamental facet of the problem of creativity many fields today, and our ways of approaching creativity by evading the encounter have played directly into this trend. We worship technique—talent—as a way of evading the anxiety of the direct encounter.
Kierkegaard understood this so well! “The present writer …” he wrote about himself, “can easily foresee his fate in an age when passion has been obliterated in favor of learning, in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during the afternoon nap.”