GD: No, we can’t. It’s almost the opposite really.  Moments like that tend to happen when it’s inconvenient.

MC: Insight functions the same way.  I need an idea.  I need an idea.  I need an idea.—but you’re never going to get that idea.  In an essay on Fitzgerald, you say: ‘I’m actively hostile to the idea of writers lashing themselves to their desk for six hours a day, irrespective of how they feel.  I write when I feel like it, don’t when I don’t.’

GD: The story of my life has been the story of the decline of discipline. When I was in A-levels, we’d get this list of all the essays for that term and I would always do them really quickly.  If we had something to do over the holidays, I would get it done as soon as I got home from school.  I often wonder whether it’s better to be much more disciplined, so that you’re in the habit of turning things into words, like Updike did, or if it’s a good idea to have periods off. There’s the danger that if you don’t write, the writing muscles will atrophy and you’ll lose the impulse. Writer’s block is just a cliché because it implies that you’ve actually got something to write, but can’t. What’s real is writer’s dread: the dread of the amount of effort involved. As you get older, that dread increases because you’re aware of all the wasted effort that has to go into writing a book. Increasingly, the problem for me is that I hate the first stages of writing.  I can’t concentrate. Getting things on paper is so painful and boring. It doesn’t matter what the first sentence is. I just write any old bollocks and organize it later. It’s extremely inefficient and I wish it wasn’t.  I wish I had arrived at a way of working where it was enjoyable earlier. But changing how you work at my age is like trying to revolutionize your backhand. When you’re young it never occurs to you that your brain might start fucking off, whereas, by the time you get to be my age, it ain’t workin’ so good no mo’e. Updike says there is nothing like being a young writer and feeling like you’ve got a lot to say.  It’s true.  That is just the best feeling of all. And that desire to say things is exacerbated by the fact that nobody’s in any hurry to open the door for you.  And that makes you push harder. Writing is such a thorough test of yourself and your capabilities. For all sorts of reasons, writing stands between me and, I suppose, nothingness. 

MC: Early in your most recent book, Zona: a book about a film about a journey to a room, you say, you are writing the book to save yourself. Save yourself from what?