I'm basically a know-it-all, and I'm writing a book about it. I want it to be called 'Danson on Water' and have me on the cover in this Christlike pose, standing on the water.
The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
I always have had a slightly jaundiced view about people who promote books about themselves.
I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me.
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.
So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
If the day gets really bad, I can always pull out fan mail. Who else gets mail where kids write to you and say, 'Dear Mr. Scieszka, we were supposed to write to our favorite author, but Roald Dahl is dead. So I'm writing to you.'
Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still... you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.
I am particularly wary of authors who put themselves on the cover of their own book.
I don't think of myself as a writer.
Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.
If I see Marian Keyes' books or Patricia Scanlan's books given more prominence than mine in the bookstore, I'll move mine to the front. I've told them I do this, and they've confessed to doing the same thing to me.
No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.
I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.
If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
No sensible author wants anything but praise.
I remember one review of The Office Christmas Special that compared it unfavourably to Dickens. What? You're saying I'm not as good as the greatest storyteller ever. Boo! Boo! I think I can live with that.
I have been the creative literary mind of the century.
I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?
One hates an author that's all author.
I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.
I wrote a book, and I just love it when people come up to me and say, 'I read your book and loved it.'
When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'
But every fool describes, in these bright days, His wondrous journey to some foreign court, And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise,-- Death to his publisher, to him 'tis sport.
