To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal.

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our e…

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual fa…

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 …