Our profession is dreadful, writing corrupts the soul. Every author is surrounded by an aura of adulation which he nurses so assiduously that he cannot begin to judge his own worth or see when it starts to decline.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian novelist and moral philosopher

Letter to Nikolay Strakhov (1876)
    (Source)

Quoted in Henri Troyat, Tolstoy (1967).