‘You ought to write’; they had one and all said it to him from the first; and he fancied he might have begun sooner if he had not been urged on by their watchful fondness. Everybody wanted him to write - everybody had decided he ought to, that he would, that he must be persuaded to; and the incessant imperceptible pressure of encouragement - the assumption of those about him that because it would be good for him to write he must naturally be able to - acted on his restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval.
—Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country