Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.
When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.
A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.
The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
Our literary culture is marinated in deep traditions of the fantastic and the supernatural, and we export those rich qualities in films and books on a spectacular industrial scale.
Stephen King writes a lot of things that are really charming and quirky, and that are more ironic than horror.
A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
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