What authors reveal
I’m reading a book right now that is just plain embarrassing. I feel like I’m intruding in the author’s head, and I don’t like what I find there.
Wedded to convention, unable to see their own bigotry, small.
The writer who can’t distinguish truth from a peanut-butter sandwich can never write good fiction. What he affirms we deny, throwing away his book in indignation; or if he affirms nothing, not even our oneness in sad or comic helplessness, and insists that he’s perfectly right to do so, we confute him by closing his books. (John Gardner, The Art of Fiction)
