Leonard Cohen quoted in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article, on why it takes him so long to write a song:
You shatter versions of the self until you get down to a line, a word, you can defend and wrap your voice around without choking.
And Schopenhauer in The Art of Literature said this:
A good author, fertile in ideas, soon wins his reader’s confidence that, when he writes, he has really and truly something to say; and this gives the intelligent reader patience to follow him with attention. Such an author, just because he really has something to say, will never fail to express himself in the simplest and most straightforward manner; because his object is to awake the very same thought in the reader that he has in himself, and no other.
