How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Safe! safe! safe!' the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry 'Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.