I must warn you: writing leads to suicide. Is it only one human life that is at stake in the act of writing? And what is a human life compared to the life of a word? Perhaps nothing. Or all. Or all of a Nothing or again Nothing of an All.
Thus they died. Thus he again picked up his pen, and this natural, almost automatic gesture seemed so loaded with unknown forces that he shivered.
— Jabés, El, or the Last Book (trans. R. Waldrop)
Notes from a Room 