Writing Is Manual Labor of the Mind

Essentially, writing is a sort of manual labor of the mind. It is a hard job, but there comes a moment in every book, I suppose, when you know you’re going to finish and then it becomes a kind of bliss, almost a sexual bliss. I once read something Graham Greene said about this feeling. The metaphor he used was a plane going down a runway and then, ultimately, leaving the ground. Occasionally he had books that he felt never did leave the runway; one of them was The Honorary Consul, though in retrospect he realized that it was one of his better books.

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE