I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

Source:The Art of Fiction No. 45, Interviewed by Nathaniel Benchley (Issue no 48, Fall 1969), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews - Fourth Series (1976), Page 197
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