How ignorant one is when faced with essential practical matters. How they trick and trap you into holes and corners. - Paul Scott

Time is quick. Life is short.

He relapsed into a silence in which his hopes scattered like mice into holes.

"Have you literary ambitions of your own?"
"I have dabbled in my time."
"Dabbled?"
Bluntly, salting my own wound, I said "I had no staying power, Mrs Hurst. Not for the things I wanted to do, at any rate. I imagined much, started little, finished nothing and published not at all."
"I think you are too easily discouraged."
"I had no original creative talent. In the field of what might be called literary research I had a sort of painstaking, plodding conscientiousness which simply meant I was well on my way to becoming a hack of sound judgment. A man could go on turning out fatuous tripe until the cows come home without necessarily knowing it."