Thousands Of Miles Of Wheat, Indifference, And

Well, People Have Been Wondering What's Going To Happen To The Novel For Two Hundred Years; Its Death Has Been Announced Many Times. You Know, I Think The Novel Keeps Redefining The World We Live In. What You Should Look For In A Novel Is A Window Nobody Else Is Looking Out Of, That Nobody Else Can Look Through. What You Look For Is A Voice. You Pick Up A Novel By Someone Such As Faulkner Or Hemingway And You Just Read Three Pages And You Know Who Wrote It. And That's What One Should Demand Of A Novelist.

I Had, Like Any Other Young Novelist, Started Out By Believing The Difficult Thing Was To Get Published And That, Once You Managed That, Well, Your Financial Problems Were Over. I Discovered, Like Any Other Serious Novelist, That Actually They Had Only Just Begun.

It Is No More Expected Of Most Producers To Read A Book Than It Is, Say, Of Ted Williams To Dust Off Home Plate.

A Novel May Take Anywhere From Two To Five Years To Write And, In The End, You Might Manage A Couple Of Thousand Dollars On It, No More.

There Are Ten Commandments, Right? Well, It's Like An Exam. You Get Eight Out Of Ten, You're Just About Top Of The Class.