A Quote by Carlos Fuentes
Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
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I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.
When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre, it can be disorienting to look inside it and think, "But what it's uncovered still isn't me. What does this mean? Do I not belong in this genre, or is there more of the genre yet to find?"
When I started in comics, people were always trying to classify me as either/or. Either a writer who appealed to women or a writer who appealed to guys. This need to categorize was just exhausting.
I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.
I've read fantasy my whole life. Quite literally; my mom read me The Hobbit before I could read stuff to myself. So I love fantasy; that's what I read for fun, it's what I read professionally to keep abreast of what's in the genre - it's where my heart is.
Don't classify me, read me.
I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.
The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.
I don't like to classify my own tracks as a genre.
I wanted to look like the most diverse writer in comics! Spy genre, space genre, crime genre, and then you realize that it's all actually the same thing.
The funny thing is, though I write mysteries, it is the one genre in adult fiction I never read. I read Nancy Drew, of course, when I was a kid, but I think the real appeal is as a writer because I'm drawn to puzzly, complicated plots.
Aunt Lovey used to tell me that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed a writer's voice. 'Read,' she'd say, 'and if you have a writer's voice, one day it will shout out, 'I can do that too!
I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.
Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.
A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.
What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.
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