It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.
Now, past middle age, with so many books written I still care about and only a few still in print, I know the feeling of being overlooked.
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.
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
What I care about is readers because without readers I can't make a living... And I think it's a bad thing for the world if people don't read anymore. I want people to read a lot.
This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.
People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
People don't care about books. They care about ideas.