Every book that doesn't first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.
I often don't read reviews.
I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.
The hard thing about the book world is that you never know whether 10 people or a million people will find it interesting.
The readers and the hearers like my books, And yet some writers cannot them digest; But what care I? for when I make a feast, I would my guests should praise it, not the cooks.
If a work alienates a reader, should that be counted against it? I respect people that love 'Ulysses,' for example, but I'm on the other side of the argument. 'Ulysses' would be better if it seduced me. But I probably have the minority point of view.
People don't understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer's feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like 'Panama' or 'Bullet Park.'
When you write, you are alone. It can be a bit of a shock later to discover that people have read what you've written!
I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.
Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive.
Normally, I have a lot of alpha readers on my books. These are people that, once I finish a novel, I let them look at it and give me a reader response.
I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction you're going to get bashed by critics.
I don't know if a novelist ever fully detaches him- or herself from what they wrote and the way they wrote it. I can watch 'Presumed Innocent' again and again, and I will always be bothered by the same things that will never bother anybody else.
You pour your soul into your book, but you never know how it will be received, and when people like your baby, it's a great feeling.
As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.
As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.
My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.
It's been wonderful to hear so many excited and intelligent responses to 'Beautiful Children,' not only from reviewers but also from the people coming out to my readings.
Whatever the reviewers feel about 'The Casual Vacancy', it is what I wanted it to be, and you can't say fairer than that as a writer.
Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.
