In fact, writing teaches, paradoxically, that someone else seems to write for us: that there is a ghostwriter in every hand […] The blankness of starting […] compels the one who writes to relive […] the queasy feeling that the definitive statement one is about to make is subject to interfering thoughts that seem to come from nowhere – and often subject to words rather than thoughts, words that turn you this way or that. The very instant of writing, Pascal’s fly buzzing, the book your eye chances to light on, a telephone call, the hangover of a dream, a literary echo – these are the stuff guiding the pen that claims authority. We notice, and are amused by, a slip of the tongue, and we have learned to study such parapraxes; but who can tell a slip of the pen that is always slipping on the pathless page?
— Geoffrey Hartman, quoted here
Notes from a Room 