I have minor setbacks probably every day of my life. I have a friend in Princeton, who’s a writer named John McPhee. He says every writer has a mini-nervous breakdown sometime in the mid-morning but keeps going. I guess that’s about it. Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum. I’m very deeply inculcated with a sense of failure for some reason. And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life. A sense that there is a movement toward light or illumination which requires strength and ingenuity. But then there’s another contrary force that pulls us back into defeat and a sense of giving up. I feel, probably, that I’m in the throes of that contest every day of my life, virtually.