It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.
'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.
Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.
That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.
Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.
I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.