I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we're sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.
In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.