It is surprising how many people who don't read believe they have a book in them. Why? Nobody would imagine that Alfred Brendel took up the piano on a whim at 25 when he found accountancy unpleasant.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.
I've always looked upon research as an opportunity to satisfy my curiosity. But the other side of the coin is one must not be so caught up in it that one never gets the book written.
It's probably true that everyone has a book in them, although it may not be a very good one.
Most people - and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all - are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right.
I have faith that worthy but misunderstood or ignored books can still prevail - and when they do, fewer joys are as sweet - but authors have families to support and rent to pay, and for them, I hope for acclaim in their time rather than late-in-life or posthumously.
I don't understand it when people get cross about how one of their works was adapted and say, 'Oh, they ruined it!' Well, the book is still there.
My personal theory is that younger audiences disdain books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter.
An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox, I felt to be a truth.
My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.