Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.
A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.
I'm a child of the literary bent. I don't want to see 140 characters. I want to see a story.
I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another, I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line, and general idea of what the book is going to be about.
And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.
Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.
The writer studies literature, not the world.