Confidence Man

I haven't been writing much lately because life seems quite intent on taking me down a few pegs and I wasn't all that stratospheric in terms of pegs to begin with. This diminishes a writer's output. My main man Calvin Trillin said it best in his book Remembering Denny:

I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is
even more important than it is in writing-—tightrope walking comes immediately to mind—but it's a difficult for me to think of anybody producing much
writing if his confidence is completely shot. In order to take a crack
at the third or fourth draft, you have to hold on to an almost insane
belief—insane in that you can't think of any rational evidence to
support it—that what you're working on, by now stupefyingly boring to
you, will be of interest or value to others.

Of course, there's an easy temporary solution: When your confidence flags, just quote other, better writers on the subject of confidence. Quotes from those other, better writers about confidence and its droopier phases are thick on the ground, fortunately. Here's Jonathan Swift, from Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift:

In Pope, I cannot read a line,
But with a sigh, I wish it mine:
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six,
It gives me such a jealous fit,
I cry, "Pox take him, and his wit!"

So there you have it. If Jonathan Swift can feel inferior, then my own feelings of inferiority (occasional, at least) put me in pretty good company. I'm confident sure that very soon I'll be back to tightrope walking over the nine parts of speech with suavity and grace. Until then, there's plenty of quotes where those two came from.