Patterson speaks from the vantage point of someone who's been poor, middle class, poor again, middle class again, and now rich. On balance, he prefers rich — but he's genuinely glad he went through all of it. He quotes Flaubert on the ecstasy of writing: 'It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.' That passage captures how Patterson feels every morning when he sits down to write, 365 days a year. Writing is his passion; the money followed. If graduates take only one thing from the speech, he wants it to be this.