So there’s this brief period of happiness when you get to the MFA program, because people say, “What do you do?” And you can say, “They pay me 900 dollars a month to be here.” And this is satisfying. But then that dissipates and everyone goes crazy. You get to see a lot of people go crazy in an MFA program—it’s very educational. And then at the end of it, one person you know has written a successful chick-lit novel that was sold to a movie company for a million dollars, and everyone else has gone off to get a Ph.D., or has just sort of gotten married.

Chad Harbach, What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions