“To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like a deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with the virus of his disillusionment. No man would set word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty and magic that he desires to create, why does he put millions of words between himself and the reality of that world? Why does he defer action – unless it be that, like other men, what he really desires is power, fame, success. ‘Books are human actions in death,” said Balzac. Yet, having perceived the truth, he deliberately surrendered to the angel, to the demon that possessed him.

A writer woos his public just as ignominiously as a politician or any other mountbank; he loves to finger the great pulse, to prescribe like a physician, to win a place for himself, to be recognized as a force, to receive the full cup of adulation, even if it be deferred a thousand years. He doesn’t want a new world which might be established immediately, because he knows it would never suit him. He wants an impossible world in which he is the uncrowned puppet-ruler dominated by forces utterly beyond his control. He is content to rule insidiously – in the fictive world of symbols – because the very thought of contact with the rude and brutal realities frightens him.”
– Henry Miller (Sexus)