Hayao Miyazaki in "Nostalgia for a Lost World," from Starting Point: 1979–1996 (translated by Beth Cary and Frederik L. Schodt):
One of the things about drawing is that, if you put in serious effort, you will become good at it, at least to a certain extent. But that's all the more reason to study a variety of things that interest you while you still have time, before you enter the professional world, in order to develop and solidify such fundamentals as your own viewpoint and way of thinking.
If you don't do this, your life will be treated as just another disposable product. In the animation business, most people spend a long time working at the bottom of the organizational ladder. You usually have to endure a lengthy apprenticeship period, waiting patiently for the chance to someday demonstrate what you can do. But the opportunity to demonstrate what you can do only comes along once in a while, so unless you are extraordinarily lucky, you'll probably never make it.
To endure something is obviously exhausting and agonizing. But at the same time, you must also continue to hold what you regard as important close to your heart and to nurture it. Should you ever relinquish what you truly hold dear, the only path left to you will be that of a pencil-pusher — the type of animator whose sense of self-worth is determined by the numerical amount of their earnings, or who cycles between joy and despair over the high or low rating his work receives.
That last paragraph pierces directly through all of my paragraphs. I have been through periods of relinquishing what I truly hold dear. I push back against the phrasing that this is an either/or proposition; it is possible to return to what you truly hold dear. Maybe the hardest part is reassessing whether what you hold dear has shifted while you were wandering cold-eyed in the wilderness.
But no matter what others may say, if it isn't something I really want to work on, it isn't animation to me. I'm talking about a very personal view of animation here, of course, and when it comes to my work there are also obviously times when I have to compromise. In fact, there are times when I really have to struggle, and I suffer quite a bit in the process.
Me too, Hayao! But we can't let that suffering strip us of the future intent to live truthfully.