A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.

Writers who draw not upon the words and thoughts of others but upon their own throughts and their own deep being will inevitably hit upon common material. The more original the work, the more imperiously recognizable it will be... A dragon, not a dragon cleverly copied or mass-produced, but a creature of evil who crawls up, threatening and inexplicable, out of the artist's own unconscious, is alive: terribly alive. It frightens little children, and the artist, and the rest of us. It frightens us because it is a part of us, and the artist forces us to admit it.

(The Language of the Night)