I assure you, all my books were first rate before they were written...

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good, should be seen, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my books were first rate before they were written...

(Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West)