Bishop Butler worked twenty years incessantly on his "Analogy," and even then was so dissatisfied that he wanted to burn it.

Rousseau says he obtained the ease and grace of his style only by ceaseless inquietude, by endless blotches and erasures.
Virgil worked eleven years on the AEneid.

The note-books of great men like Hawthorne and Emerson are tell-tales of enormous drudgery, of the years put into a book which may be read in an hour.

Montesquieu was twenty-five years writing his "Esprit de Louis," yet you can read it in sixty minutes.

Adam Smith spent ten years on his "Wealth of Nations." A rival playwright once laughed at Euripides for spending three days on three lines, when he had written five hundred lines.