I began assiduously examining the style and technique of those whom I once admired and worshipped: Nietsche, Dostoievski, Hamsun, even Thomas Mann, whom today I discard as being a skill fabricator, a brick maker, an inspired jack-ass or draught horse. I imitated every style in hope of finding the clue to the gnawing secret of how to write. Finally I came to a dead end, to a despair and desperation which few men have known, because there was no divorce between myself as writer and myself as man: to fail as a writer meant to fail as a man. And I failed. I realized that I was nothing -less than nothing- a minus quantity. It was at this point, in the midst of the dead Saragasso Sea, so to speak, that I really began to write. I began from scratch, throwing everything overboard, even those whom I most loved. Immediately I heard my own voice I was enchanted: The act that it was a separate, distinct, unique voice sustained me. It didn’t matter to me if what I wrote should be considered bad. Good and bad dropped out of my vocabulary. I jumped with two feet into the realm of aesthetics, the non-moral, the non-ethical, non-utilitarian of art. My life itself became a work of art …. I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.
Henry Miller, Reflections on Writing