Nabokov's House

“If you go to Nabokov’s house, metaphorically speaking, you get his best chair, in front of his fire, with his best wine. If you go to James Joyce’s house, you come into this big drafty edifice, and there’s no one there. And then you find him tinkering around in some scullery. And he offers you two slabs of peat around a conger eel, and a glass of mead. This not loving the reader, that’s the real thing. Henry James fell out of love with the reader. His early stuff, up to about Portrait of a Lady, is full of love for the reader. Then, I think out of sheer disappointment at not getting the kind of audience he wanted, the size of audience he wanted, he fell out of love – it was separate beds, then separate rooms, then separate flats. James never gave a damn for the reader in the first place, partially because perhaps he had patrons and never had to think about it. But it’s not that you want sales or anything like that, it’s that you want to do the right thing by your readers, and you want readers. Because a story is nothing without a listener.”

- Martin Amis.

Borges said of Henry James that "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life." H.G. Wells said that he was "a hippopotamus picking up a pea."

Why I Began To Write For Children

Why I began to Write for Children
- Isaac Bashevic Singer

• "Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about the critics.
• Children don’t read to find their identity.
• They don’t read to free themselves of guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation.
• They have no use for psychology.
• They detest sociology.
• They don’t try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake.
• They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.
• They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides, or footnotes.
• When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority.
• They don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions."

- From his 1978 Nobel banquet speech.

(From the excellent futilitycloset.com)