It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all.

... Dickens is to me a writer apart. I have been reading and re-reading his novels since I was six. I know his characters as I hardly know any of the men and women I have met in the flesh. Dickens is the novelist of the lettered and of the unlettered. The man at the street corner who has hardly heard of Thackeray knows all about and .

I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.

Born a generation earlier, in the circumstances for their class, and/or race, and/or sex, no Chekhov, Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Maxim Gorky, no D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Sean O'Casey, no Franz Kafka, Albert Camus-the list comes long now: say, for a sampling, no A. E. Coppard, Charles Olson, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, etc. etc. etc. etc.

be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.

(Who are some of the writers you enjoy reading and re-reading?) SK: Dostoevsky and Simone De Beauvoir. Since I was a young teenager, I started reading them and I never stopped...Those two writers affected me deeply. But this is not the whole truth. The truth, the real truth, is that the writer, any writer, is made by all the readings she or he makes. We are influenced not just by one or two or ten writers. We are influenced by everything we read. Whether we are aware of this fact or not makes no difference. We read, we devour. We digest what we read and grow. Just like food. Without food we never grow. Without reading we never write.

Tolstoy, Stendhal and Cervantes, these men follow me around. They stand in dark corners and eye me disapprovingly from beneath supercilious eyebrows. And all because I’ve never got round to reading their blasted, thousand-page, three-ton, five-generation, state-of-a-nation thingummywhatsits. I don’t care. Or rather, sometimes I do, and at other times I remember that I’m a tortoise-slow reader and that there’s a pub just around the corner.

When the last reader reads no more.

There are some books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after they come out.

Hay libros que tenemos a nuestro lado veinte años sin leerlos, libros de los que no nos alejamos, que llevamos de una ciudad a otra, de un país a otro, cuidadosamente empaquetados, aunque haya muy poco sitio, y que tal vez hojeamos en el momento de sacarlos de la maleta; sin embargo, nos guardamos muy bien de leer aunque sólo sea una frase completa. Luego, al cabo de veinte años, llega un momento en el que, de repente, como si estuviéramos bajo la presión de un imperativo superior, no podemos hacer otra cosa que coger un libro de estos y leerlo de un tirón, de cabo a rabo: este libro actúa como una revelación. En aquel momento sabemos por qué le hemos hecho tanto caso. Tenía que ocupar sitio; tenía que ser una carga, y ahora ha llegado a la meta de su viaje; ahora levanta su vuelo; ahora ilumina los veinte años transcurridos en los que ha vivido mudo a nuestro lado. No hubiera podido decir tantas cosas si no hubiera estado mudo durante este tiempo, y qué imbécil se atrevería a afirmar que en el libro hubo siempre lo mismo.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

What is a classic? Is a classic a book that stays in print? Who decides what stays in print, what gets remaindered, what makes it into paperback, onto the supermarket displays, back into hardbound collected works? Alice Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was out of print for seven years. It didn't change. By what mechanism is it now available in paperback? Pat Parker's Movement In Black is out of print, as is Barbara Deming's work. How might their work come back to us? By their deaths? "Discovery" by an influential critic? In fact, much of the work of Aphra Behn, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Angelina Weld Grimké, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, H.D., and others, was out of print or hard to come by prior to the second wave of feminism (and who knew that all of these women loved women!) Is this work classic now, but not then? Can we only talk about classics after a suitable passage of time?