Kafka's creative block and the 4 psychological hindrances keeping the talented from manifesting their talent; a physicist on death and the life-force

All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work