There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
An author's characters do what he wants them to do.
I think with every writer there are two people there.
I like writing characters that seem different from one another. So if you were to hypothetically look at a bunch of lines from books I've written, just out of context, hopefully you would be able to determine who said what. That's the goal, anyway. I try to strongly differentiate through dialogue.
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 think all writers are different. I've been with a few writers; they're all different.
The writer crafts their ideal world. In my world, everyone has really long conversations or just picks apart pop culture to death and everyone talks in monologue.
I'm a postmodern commentator, and so, in a cheeky parallel to James Joyce or James Kelman, I get to places, verbally, that are a little unusual - when I talk about Jocky Wilson and end up sounding like a Jackson Pollock of the commentary box.
With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
Robert Jordan, whether he's writing with passion or not, I don't know.
When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.