I've always said, since I got to know him and wrote about him, that he's the generation he least appeals to is his own and I think in many ways he was born middle-aged and that's become apparent in recent years.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.
I'm of Neil Young's generation. Neil Young's songs have spoken to what it's like to be at least a white male of his generation over the years. Endlessly, he's sung about the stuff that I really care about. He's put into words the feelings that hit you at different transitional moments in life.
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.
I grew up with the one of the most famous fathers in the world in the 1960s and '70s. He passed away in 1984, and as time went on, people didn't know him. That blew me away.
I am super-proud to have a sort of famous character in my background that if you're a certain age, he was probably a part of your youth. I think that's pretty cool.
I tend to write about more than one generation because as a child I had contact with more than one generation; it was normal to be around older people.
Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
I think young generation is always better than last generation. No matter you like it or don't like it. My father said, 'Jack, I'm so good, you'll never be' - but I'm better than him. My father is better than my grandfather. My children will be better than us.