From “Journalism and Literature,” an essay that appears for the first time in English in the collection Old Truths and New Clichés, which will be published next month by Princeton University Press. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Translated from the Yiddish by the author.

I know of writers who consider it a tragedy to earn a living from journalism. They claim that it wastes their free time and that journalism is generally harmful to literary creativity. They argue that a journalist becomes accustomed to writing in a hurry and not weighing and measuring every…