You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…..” and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…..”

The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…..” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy our enemy’s ear by force. Because all of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

A novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others.

Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
This here is such a negativity about writing novels yet in his more recent nonfiction he praises The Novel so much. I can't see though how there could be anything but some illusion going with successfully writing hundreds of pages of stuff... Even here, where very little time was put in, there most certainly was an illusion, as was mentioned many times...