From John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction :

…life in the university has almost never produced subject matter for really good fiction. The life has too much trivia, too much mediocrity, to much soap opera…

The success of fools in the university world is one of God’s great mysteries.

…most of the books one finds in drugstores, supermarkets, and even small-town public libraries are not well written at all; a smart chimp with a good creative-writing teacher and a real love of sitting around banging a typewriter could have written books vastly more interesting and elegant.

Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind.

The first two make me laugh out loud because I used to work at a university. I’d wanted to do so for years (be careful what you wish for) because I figured professors would be the most mature people on Earth-the ones with the most education and therefore the most perspective. It turned out that professors have no more perspective than anyone else and that life inside the ivory tower was exactly like life outside of it-it’s secondary school and sixth form (high school to the Yanks) forever. The cliques may change, but it’s still high school. I laugh at the thought of spending eternity surrounded by 14 through 18 year olds, but the laughter is more of the HA HA HEE HEE HO HO of insanity that hilarity.

The last quote is amusing because recently an acquaintance told me to write crap if that’s all that people want to read and I told her I couldn’t do it. Besides the mental block I have against putting more rubbish on the planet my mind simply doesn’t work in the ‘plucky-twenty-something-seeks-fame-finds-millionaire’ genre. And Deityofyourchoice help me if I’ll ever write a fantasy novel. People live in enough of a fantasy world without spending more time there.

But this wasn’t supposed to be a rant about the sorry state of literacy (are you really literate if you only read trash?)-it was supposed to be a few amusing quotes of a Sunday…