One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates the dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out into another world, leap the gap.

[…] A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along …

Sister Theodora, in Calvino's Our Ancestors