That is why writers are so unwilling to talk about a work in progress. They are afraid of speaking too soon and from the wrong place, with the wrong voice; of resolving too quickly, in talk, the tension whose energies they will need to draw on later, in solitary struggle and against the resistance of what has not yet been articulated. The writer needs both to trust words and to be wary of them. A writer, as Thomas Mann tells us, is someone who finds writing difficult.
– David Malouf, The Writing Life