About the perils and difficulties of creation

"[...] to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this of that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from thos books of analysis and confession. 'Mighty poets in their misery dead' -- that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.

But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question [...] "

And so on.

The perilous torture of not being able to read, oh dear reader, let alone to create. Described and explained in Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" which seems to have been read by every educated woman I know except for me. "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write". This I've found specially true since I left the parental house looking for new experiences.

The Complete "A Room of One's Own", by Virginia Woolf.