I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.
A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.
In the past, I'll admit, I've enjoyed being compared to the protagonists in my screenplays.
The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.
I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.
I just don't think most people put myself and Robert Frost in the same category.
I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography.
I think I'm way too much of a control freak to co-author anything with anyone. I have a hard enough time writing with myself! I admire people that can do it, but it's not for me.
You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman... 'You never can tell...' he answered. 'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly. 'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!
I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.
Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.
What happens to us all, I think, when we pick up a pen, is that we just become snobs.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.
I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.
I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.
I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.
