the same zoo

"Friends of his had advised him that if he wanted to make it as a creative writer, he should stop savaging other people's work, but you might as well ask a bird not to fly or a cat not to hunt; and besides, what would his poetry be worth if he wrote it while living in the same zoo as all the other denatured animals, safe but not free? And that was without even mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct  the tendency of culture likewise to err toward safety and mediocrity,  a responsibility you couldn't measure in dinner invitations."

~~ from Kudos by Rachel Cusk