The first and most essential stage in achieving clarity, the stage of deep non-verbal reflection, is something about which, in the nature of the case, little can be said. To a few remarkable beings, clear presentational structures seem to come as the leaves to the trees. Mozart sometimes said that when a piece of music came to him it arrived all at once. There may be quite a few of us to whom this happens occasionally. However, most of us, most of the time, need to struggle through prolonged, frustrating, unverbalizable gropings to get the necessary pre-verbal grasp of what it is we want to say. This requires prolonged concentration, and for it we usually want to be left undisturbed for long periods. Hence the familiar self-isolation of the creative worker, his basic need being not solitude or time but absence of distraction. Any stimulus strong enough not to be ignorable is a threat to creativity. Keeping all, or nearly all, such stimuli at bay for the necessary periods of time calls for enough determination to say No to other people, including our nearest and dearest, and to insist on doing our own thing regardless of what they may want or think. This makes demands on our characters as well as on our minds. It would be idle to pretend that accident of circumstance does not also play a part, sometimes a decisive one. Schopenhauer said that he would never have been able to accomplish his life’s work if his father had not left him financial independence. I suspect that something close to this is true of a number of great thinkers and artists who have not said it. Obviously, too, many vicissitudes besides the need to earn a living can hobble a creative person.
(Bryan Magee, "Clarity in Philosophy," Philosophy 89 [July 2014]: 451-62, at 454-5)
