In order to write about life first you must live it.
And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. I don't think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want;
The beauty of literature is that it allows us to live a thousand lives in one.
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him.