As you get older, you husband your attentions, they seem to concentrate themselves more, you are more fluent about less. You use your energies and, with any luck, they burn with an intenser light. ... One can't get on if paralyzed by the grinding knowledge of the brevity of life, and the ephemerality of works. And getting on is our most important duty, a vow we make in the worthiness of the baffling endeavor of remaining human. One part of being human is sometimes failing to keep the faith. For a writer, who spends his time so many fathoms down in the murk and complexity of the human personality, periods of "savourlessness" are inevitable. As I say, they usually presage an on-coming change, and the only way to initiate that change is to pass through (not around) the temporary melancholia. You can't reach dawn without enduring the night. Wishing won't make it so.

            --John Clellon Holmes