I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.

Get it out of your historic head.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

My mind is vacant on names, but I know him as well as anything. When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

[Yet the writer's lot has particular satisfactions.] When a novel is published, however it's received, ... it is the book you wrote, and a better version is not sitting on the cutting-room floor because your distributor insisted on 17 ill-advised cuts.