" What do they have in common, all these people I read in college and thereafter? All men, and all dead. Their distance from us in chronology seems to give them overwhelming authority. But they were not dead when they wrote and they were as human as the rest of us. They caught colds in damp weather and had occasional pimples in adolescence. I like to think that they enjoyed making love, spending an evening with friends, tramping through the woods with the dogs. The fact that they were men simply speaks for their day when women may have been powers behind the throne; but they were kept behind it.
Whatever possessed these writers to sit down and write their view on the creative process? Maybe they were prodded, as I have been, and maybe at least a few of them hesitated at the presumption of it. "

― Madeleine L'Engle , Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art