Barbara’s studio

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

I know this is a sentimental cliché, but I do feel toward my books very much as a parent must toward his children.  As soon as someone says, “I did like your short stories, but I don’t like your novels,” or, “Of course, you only really came into your own with Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” –  then immediately I want to defend all my other books.  I feel this especially about Hemlock  and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes – one child a bit odd but exciting, the other competent but not really so interesting.  If people say they like one book and not the other, then I feel they can’t have understood the one they don’t like.

Angus Wilson in The Paris Review Interviews:  Writers at Work 1st Series, edited and with an introduction by Malcolm Cowley

Comments are welcome!