Any artist knows that the space between the stage where the work is too unformed to have committed itself and the stage where it is too late to improve it can be as thin as a needle.  Genius perhaps consists in opening out this needle-like area until it covers almost the whole of the working time.   Most artists, through sheer idleness, weariness, inability to attend, drift again and again and again from the one stage straight into the other, in spite of good resolutions and the hope with which each new work begins.  This is of course a moral problem, since all art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.  There is an analogous transition in the everyday proceedings of the moral agent.  We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it.  We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them.  We allow the vague pleasure-seeking annoyance-avoiding tide of our being to hurry us onward until the moment when we announce that we can no other.  There is thus an external discrepancy between the self-knowledge which we gain by observing ourselves objectively and the self-awareness which we have of ourselves subjectively: a discrepancy which probably makes it impossible for us ever to arrive at the truth. 

— Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973)

I. Murdoch, The Black Prince, London, Vintage Books, 1999, p.189