I don't think I have a very novelistic brain. I like to read, but I don't know if I could ever write a novel.
It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.
What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!
When you're a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.
I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.
Sometimes I get jealous when I'm reading a great book by a younger writer. But 'White Tiger' is so good, I almost forgot to hate Aravind Adiga.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
