Writing

"What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words!
His real life is led in his head
and is known to none but himself.
All day long, and every day,
the mill of his brain is grinding,
and his thoughts (which are but the
mute articulation of his feelings)
are his history.
His acts and his words
are merely the visible thin crust of his world,
with its scattered
snow summits and its vacant wastes of water,
and they are so trifling a part of his bulk!
The mass of him is hidden--
it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil,
and never rest, night nor day.
These are his life, and they are not written,
and cannot be written.
Every day would make a whole book of 80,000 words
three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man--
the biography of the man himself cannot be written."

--Mark Twain, Autobiography