I keep this quote by my desk. I absolutely love it.

“I cannot tell you what work I spent upon the fugue scene! Brain work excites and exhausts me so preposterously, I prowl up and down till every limb aches fit to come off, and I cry like fifty fools, and rub my hair on end, and break or crush anything that is between my fingers for its sins—and am so found by the maid who announces callers or some other detail of sub-lunary existence! And then I feel inclined to throw turnips at my own head and ask myself—if you’re played out like this over a tale the length of a halfpenny tract, whereabouts would you be with a novel?”
 —Juliana Horatia Ewing, 1884