Writers are like....

I recently read a personal essay by Russell Banks that he'd written about the writing process. At the end, he's talking to a guy, Jocko, he'd once been friends with, who was more or less a criminal. But Jocko had always hung out with musicians and poets. Banks asks him why, and this is Jocko's answer:

"Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie."

An interesting analagy, don't you think? Writers can feel--or seem to be-- like outlaws, on the fringe of decency, normalcy. And some of them aren't above stealing and taking no prisoners.

But perhaps this metaphor is now belabored.