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.
The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense.
There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.
I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.
I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.
I'm very grateful that anyone takes the time to read what I write, coming from people perceive to be exclusively a musical background and having no traditional schooling in writing.
As a writer I'm merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.
I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.
I made a choice that I was not going to be a pretentious writer.
In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.
Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
I wouldn't write a book, because saying the word I over and over again would nauseate me.
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
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.
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.
