Joseph Conrad on writer's block

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all. Innthe course of that working way of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't do it for fear of waking the baby and alarming my wife. After such crises of despair I doze for hours, still held conscious that there is that story that I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again, and at last go to bed completely done up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with that horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts....
I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style. And that stroy I can't write weaves itself into all I se, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. ...I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid - in an evading shape. I can't get hold of it. It is all there - to bursting, yet I can't get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water....
I never mean to be slow. The stuff comes out at its own rate. I am always ready to put it down...the trouble is that too often, alas, I've to wait for the sentence, for the word... The worst is that while I'm thus powerless to porduce, my imaginaation is extremely active; whole paragraphs, whole pagges, whole chapters pass through my mind. Everything is there: descriptions, dialogue, reflection, everything, everything but the bleief, the conviction, the lonly thing needed to make me put pen to paper. I've thought out a volume a day till I felt sick in mind and heart and gone to bed, completely done up, without havinng written a line. The effort I put out should give birth to a Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then.