Huxley on Snails and Writers
"Slugs go through life leaving only a fading trail of slime; the snail bequeaths to the world an elaborately convoluted shell. The writer is a snail in the midst of slugs…Snails make excellent fossils; slugs tend to disappear without leaving a trace. Literary fame is a function of fossilizability. Unlike his biological counterpart, the writer-snail can become a fossil, even a series of fossils, while his is still alive. For the aging writer this fact is often a source of considerable embarrassment and annoyance."
Aldous Huxley in the Foreword to Eschelbach and Shober’s Aldous Huxley A Bibliopgraphy 1916-1959