A Quote by Ben Richards
I wrote about the life of a housing officer in Britain, in a pretty rough area of London. Maybe it was because I'm a big-mouth and an exhibitionist, and I'm slightly egotistical. All those things have to come together for a writer.
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I say "on principle" [regarding 'lesbian writer'] because whenever you get one of your minority labels applied, like "Irish Writer," "Canadian Writer," "Woman Writer," "Lesbian Writer" - any of those categories - you always slightly wince because you're afraid that people will think that means you're only going to write about Canada or Ireland, you know.
'Kraken' is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it's more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It's London as a kind of fantasy kingdom.
There's many things that I am. And all of those things come together at some point. If somebody wants to limit me, you know and they'll say, 'Well, this is Walter Mosley, the mystery writer.' I don't like that. Because I do many things.
When I get real big volumes of hate mail, it's usually because I wrote something poorly. But it's also because some group told people to e-mail me and those people didn't read the article, they read the post about what I wrote about. And they all e-mail me. And they all come around at the same time.
You may be modest and un-egotistical in your life; I'm quite ordinary. But I play big egotistical parts.
What, for me, was exciting about America was just this extraordinary, complex, difficult, fascinating country, and Britain can feel very small. London, in particular, feels small because everything happens there, so you have publishing, politics, you have finance; everything in Britain happens in London.
I think there's a danger of becoming too familiar with things, isn't there? That you kind of, when you're used to seeing the same things every day, you see those things come what may, and you don't see maybe the interesting things just slightly out of view behind them.
"Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them.
I was a 20-something woman living in London and didn't want to write about a 20-something woman living in London! It's an area well covered already, and people would probably have thought it was about me. I decided that if I wrote about an 82-year-old dementia sufferer, then no one could mistake it as a memoir.
London and Fog! When these two come together, it is time to be a writer!
One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.
I do kind of think there's a bit of an overemphasis on - in the community - on sort of achieving ever-so-slightly better state-of-the-art results on particular problems, and a little underappreciation of completely different approaches to problems that maybe don't get state of the art because it's actually super hard and a pretty explored area.
I actually find in America, there's a slight snobbery about actors who go back and forth between big heavy dramas and popcorn fare. That always intrigues me, because that doesn't exist in the same way in Britain. And I imagine it would be worse. In terms of the sort of class, and the sort of snobby, slightly on the back-foot thing Britain has. But it's much more prevalent in America. I'm really intrigued by it. I don't know why that is. But I'm aiming to break down those barriers by being in a Shakespeare film and a Smurfs film within six months of each other.
There isn't a performer on earth that isn't an exhibitionist. There isn't any point in being in this business if you're not an exhibitionist. And, by the way, you can be an exhibitionist and be very shy as well.
I came to London during what was called the second British invasion. The music was from Britain, the fashion was from Britain, everything was from Britain, so I knew I had to be in Britain.
One area in which we can be certain mass immigration has an effect is housing. More than one third of all new housing demand in Britain is caused by immigration. And there is evidence that without the demand caused by mass immigration, house prices could be 10% lower over a 20-year period.
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