But I am looking for the angry men in literature. Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it. Let me tell you about our profession. We are the meanest, nastiest bunch of jealous, petty people who ever lived . . . Every time we have to publish a public affairs book, we cringe.
People forget about the event it deals with.
The attention span of the American public is fleeting. We sell books, other people sell shoes. Publishing isn't the highest art. This may be a painful pill for would-be Faulkners and Austens to swallow, and my last desire to denigrate the miraculous processes by which raw inspiration is transmuted into literature. Your Own Literary Agent Big corporations require big profits from big books, and the ones that tend to suffer are the offbeat, quirky, controversial or intellectually challenging ones.