On the Cost of Writing Well, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I have asked a lot of my emotions-one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something- not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald