A Room of One's Own / Virginia Woolf

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot* in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod** up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.

* a trophy; i.e. an award or prize of any kind

** to measure your work against his own and that of other men