As it happens, his magnum opus, "Das Kapital," was not published
until after 15 years of procrastination, fibbing and boasting about its
progress. When the weighty tome failed to elicit the explosive response
he anticipated, Marx compared himself to the hero of Balzac's "Unknown
Masterpiece," an artist who spends years refining and retouching a
portrait until it becomes nothing but a formless mass of color and
random lines. "Nothing. Nothing. After 10 years of work," the artist
cries.
-- Sylvia Nasar, "The First Marxist." Review of Karl Marx
A Life. by Francis Wheen, in New York Times Book Review
May 21, 2000.
Years ago, when I was young, I knew a man who was a doctor, and not a
bad one either, but he didn't practise. He spent years burrowing away
in the library of the British Museum and at long intervals produced a
hunge pseudo-scientific, pseudo-philosophical book that nobody read
and that he had to publish at his own expense. He wrote four or five
of them before he died and they were absolutely worthless.... It's a
toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. many are called but
few are chosen.
-- W. Somerset Maugham. The Razor's Edge (1944) p.94