I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.
I think that screenwriting probably isn't seen as writing in the same way that novel-writing is seen as writing. But I certainly don't see it that way.
The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.
To move up to hardcover is a way of getting more attention for my books. It means a lot to me: It means my books are legitimate.
At the end of the day, I'm writing in a genre that isn't highly regarded.
Somebody asked Somerset Maugham about his place in the pantheon of writers, and he said, "I'm in the very front row of the second rate." I'm sort of haunted by that.
It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.
I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.
For whatever reason, when it came out in 1995, 'Infinite Jest' became a cultural event. It was the massive book that was 'cool' for all the Gen Xers to read.
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
I don't aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.
Some books that I've read on the Kindle, I've been like, 'I want that on my shelf.' Because it says, 'I'm the kind of person who has read this.' The kind of books that says, 'I'm serious and intellectual and historical and race-conscious.'
You don't have to be dead to write a classic, and you don't have to be literary to be smart.
To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.
I felt like I'd culturally arrived when a character on the HBO show 'True Blood' was reading a hardback of 'Heartsick' at Sookie's kitchen table.
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.
One is told that you're either a hot writer, or you're finished and you're over. But of course, the more you hang around and the more you become aware not only of what "reputation" is for other writers, but also what your own reputation is, you become aware that it's much more complicated than the conventional media would have you believe.
My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low.
The reason some crime writers have a chip on their shoulder about the label is because their good books are shelved beside books about nuns and birdwatchers and cats who solve crimes. Overseas, my books are reviewed alongside those of authors like Robert Stone and Don DeLillo, and I have to live and die by that comparison. They don't ghettoize crime writers in other countries, and of course they shouldn't.
That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto, whereas the graphic novel is now being held up as something to aspire to and as something that's respectable for adults to read.
Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.
I'm not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.
Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
