Henry Miller touched on this a lot when he wrote about struggling to be a writer. No matter what you think of Miller — the misogynist, the pornographer, whatever—he wrote most brilliantly about the art of writing. This is one of my favorites…and it speaks to my point, and to yours, Bruce.

““Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.” —Henry Miller