Describing the moment when a story first began to take shape:
“…then ensued in my mind what a student of chemistry would best understand from the addition of the tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of crystallization in a test tube containing some colorless solution. It was at first for me a mental change, disturbing a quieted-down imagination, in which strange forms, sharp in outline but imperfectly apprehended, appeared and claimed attention as crystals will do by their bizarre and unexpected shapes.”
Author’s Note to The Secret Agent, 1920