Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.
I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.
Sometimes I don't like the books that I'm reading.
I believe passionately in preemptive pessimism, especially before a book comes out. I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales, and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.
Oftentimes when you see adaptations of books you like, you're let down. As an author, you assume that they are going to suck. A little bit of hope is dangerous.
What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.
I want things to be better all the time. And I tend to get angry about that. Books are an opportunity to vent.
I always want my books to reach a positive point in the end.
A book's flaws make it less predictable.
I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I don't really want to set a book in any real place ever again.
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