Black Altars Quotes

“He attempted to distract his thoughts from the events that were overwhelming him by going over his papers. These were the sum total of his literary output over the last fifteen years. In the early days he had harbored an inflated idea as to the merit of his work and had even enjoyed publication in magazines that nobody read. It was only later that he discovered he preferred to write for himself alone and not for the dubious pleasure of seeing his strange works in print. He liked to dream over them, writing only when inspiration came to him, which was infrequently, and the half-formed pieces and the false starts were either destroyed or subsumed into longer writings—of which there were few. He enjoyed destroying the work that did not satisfy him. Sometimes he even wondered if he actually wrote just so he could obliterate the results.”
― Mark Samuels, Black Altars