Life can’t defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death.

The line frames writing not as a profession but as an all-consuming attachment that can outlast hardship. Ferber suggests that when a writer’s primary allegiance is to the act of writing itself, ordinary defeats—rejection, financial strain, illness, disappointment—cannot finally “defeat” them, because lived experience continually supplies material and emotional fuel. The metaphor of life as the writer’s “lover” implies a reciprocal relationship: the writer courts life for its scenes, conflicts, and sensations, while life continually offers itself up to be transformed into art. The final clause, “until death,” underscores both the lifelong nature of this devotion and the idea that writing is a way of staying intimately engaged with existence right up to its end.