“Youth” by J. M. Coetzee (post 4): Memoir’s narrator says protagonist thinks “To know one’s own mind too well spells the death of the creative spark.”

This is the full quotation:

“Usually he does not know his own mind, does not care to know his own mind. To know one’s own mind too well spells, in his view, the death of the creative spark” (1, p. 232).

Before reading the above (I’m still reading Youth), I had come to a similar conclusion about writers' beliefs on creativity in a recent post:

A number of writers have acknowledged that they have more than one self, at least two—a regular self and a writing self. Some writers have said that you cannot interview the one who actually wrote their books. Many writers claim that they have co-writers or ghost writers of one sort or another: muses, voices, daemons, shadows, the unconscious, narrators, and their characters, themselves.

But these same novelists object if I call the above a normal version of multiple personality, because that makes their creative process sound too rational, too explainable. And if there is one thing about their creative process that they are sure of, it is the mystery at its heart.

Could I be right? Or is Coetzee saying something that writers believe only in their youth?

1. J. M. Coetzee. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood [1997], Youth [2002], Summertime [2009]. New York, Penguin Books, 2011.