Time & Perspective Quote by Zane Grey

There is something bracingly unsentimental in Grey calling his own imagination a "treasure mine" and then immediately attaching a cost to it: time, toil, torture. The line refuses the cozy myth of the writer as a gifted conduit. It frames creation as extraction, a violent kind of labor where value exists, but only if you are willing to break yourself open to get it.

The phrase "go deeper and even stronger" reads like a self-issued command, almost athletic in its cadence. Grey, best known for making the American West feel mythic and marketable, is reminding himself that the raw material of that myth does not arrive polished. Mining is solitary work; it is also dangerous work. "Treasure" carries the promise of payoff and public reward, while "torture" admits what the audience usually doesn't see: the drafts that fail, the self-doubt, the physical grind of sustained attention. He collapses romance and brutality into one sentence, which is exactly how popular epics are made: by turning discomfort into narrative propulsion.

Context matters: Grey wrote in an era when the West was being rapidly modernized, fenced, and bureaucratized even as it was being sold as frontier legend. To keep that legend vivid, he has to "stint nothing" - no rationing of effort, no protecting the self. The subtext is a wager that authenticity (or at least intensity) can be manufactured, but only through a kind of disciplined suffering. The mine isn't just a metaphor for ideas; it's a metaphor for Grey turning his own life into ore.