My Love Affair with Colette

This is an essay from a beloved (by me) French author Colette on the art of writing:

A woman of letters who has turned out badly: that is what I must remain for everyone, I who no longer write, who deny myself the pleasure, the luxury of writing.
To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play around a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature, half butterfly, half fairy.
To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized at the reflection of the window in the silver inkstand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one’s cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb on the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and laden with treasures that one unloads slowly on the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp.
To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it – and to find, the next day, in the place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.
To write is the joy and the torment of the idle. Oh, to write! From time to time, I feel a need as sharp as a thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its’ flexible double pointed nib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective . . . The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar. It takes up too much time to write. And the trouble is, I am no Balzac! The fragile story I’m constructing crumbles away when the tradesman rings or the shoemaker sends in his bill, when the solicitor or one’s counsel telephones, or when the theatrical agent summons me to his office for “a social engagement at the house of some people of very good position but not in the habit of paying large fees”.