Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.
Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.
People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.
I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.