Mr McCarthy says:

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way. Things I’ve written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there’s something about writing about it that flattens them. You’ve used them up.

And, on the subject of the future and art:

Well, I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.

And, while talking about his forthcoming book, which is about a brother and sister, he says:

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Neil Gaiman said something similar about writing The Graveyard Book: he didn’t feel ready, waited a few years and tried again, but didn’t feel ready; and then, one day, he realized he wasn’t getting any better, so he sat down and wrote it. I wonder if there is any point of waiting for competence, then—working as one waits, of course—whether these two respectable writers achieved a new level of skill after waiting which made their stories manageable. Assuming the writer is basically competent initially, I suspect not. Some stories need time to simmer; it’s true, but writers improve themselves by daring to write stories that test the clarity of their vision.