Virginia Woolf's Great Novel, 'mrs. Dalloway,' Is

. . . He Felt Himself Entering A Moment So Real He Could Only Run Toward It, Shouting.

Maybe It’s Not, In The End, The Virtues Of Others That So Wrenches Our Hearts As It Is The Sense Of Almost Unbearably Poignant Recognition When We See Them At Their Most Base, In Their Sorrow And Gluttony And Foolishness. You Need The Virtues, Too—some Sort Of Virtues—but We Don’t Care About Emma Bovary Or Anna Karenina Or Raskolnikov Because They’re Good. We Care About Them Because They’re Not Admirable, Because They’re Us, And Because Great Writers Have Forgiven Them For It.

I Have No Useful Theories About Love And Marriage.

Like My Hero Virginia Woolf, I Do Lack Confidence. I Always Find That The Novel I'm Finishing, Even If It's Turned Out Fairly Well, Is Not The Novel I Had In My Mind. I Think A Lot Of Writers Must Negotiate This, And If They Don't Admit It, They're Not Being Honest.

I Revise Constantly, As I Go Along And Then Again After I've Finished A First Draft. Few Of My Novels Contain A Single Sentence That Closely Resembles The Sentence I First Set Down. I Just Find That I Have To Keep Zapping And Zapping The English Language Until It Starts To Behave In Some Way That Vaguely Matches My Intentions.