I am assuming that The Guardian did not link to this rare interview M.J. Hyland has secured with Colm Toibin because it only went live yesterday, as part of issue 2 of the Manchester Review from the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing.
Not sure if it's enjoyable as such - more of everyone's plaints on what hard work it all is, but an interview from Toibin is certainly not a common event.
*Update: The Guardian decided to ask a few others whether they were happy Vegemites. John Banville suggests that
The pleasure of writing is in the preparation, not the execution, and certainly not in the thing executed. The novelist daily at his desk eats ashes, and if occasionally he encounters a diamond he is likely to break a tooth on it. Money is necessary to pay the dentist's bills.
Alice Waugh of MobyLives, who provided that last link, is more sanguine:
It’s not just the people who are willing to bare all for the broadsheets who talk this way. When I started writing a novel, a wise lady, for whom I have enormous respect, warned me thus: ‘You’ll be locked in a room, stuck to a chair. Your bottom will become enormous and you won’t be able to communicate when you emerge from seclusion.” She was to a large extent right, although Pilates has helped with some of it. But is all this really necessary? However great the angst, novelists are allowed to escape into their own heads and make up invisible friends without being sectioned. That’s got to count for something, surely.
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