Still Hope?

In Jay Neugeboren's review of Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life (Other Press, 2009), which tracks Greenberg's (relatively late) emergence as a "writer" (in his early fifties), Neugeboren makes the following disclosure, reflecting on Greenberg's tale:

"I found myself noting that I had myself accumulated, by my count, 576 rejections before I sold my first story, and more than two thousand rejections on eight unpublished books before I sold my first novel. What keeps writers going, as it does Greenberg, is a sense that though, when rejected or ignored, we may feel such things intensely, we learn not to take them personally."

Strangely encouraging...