If a reviewer is beating me up, I just say, 'Oh well, my writing is not to his or her taste.' And that's as far as it goes. Because I will simultaneously read a review where somebody says, 'Oh my God, I had so much fun reading this book and I learned so much.'
I will say overwhelmingly what means so much more to me than the opinion of one reviewer are the letters I get from fans who tell me how a particular book has changed their life.
The truth is, my folk-lore friends and my Saturday Reviewer differ with me on the important problem of the origin of folk-tales. They think that a tale probably originated where it was found.
I was a latecomer to romance, although I did read gothics. My father used to work for the 'Fort Worth Star-Telegram,' and their book reviewer, author Leonard Sanders, would pass on the gothics for my dad to give to me since Leonard didn't review gothics. I gobbled up books by Mary Stewart, Madeleine Brent, Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney.
I don't care what reviewers think. If somebody hates a performance of mine, I kind of get a kick out of it. It amuses me when critics take something so irrelevant as a movie so seriously.
I never engage negatively with reviewers. If someone says something that enrages me, I do what I do on stage. I make a joke about myself and move on. Sometimes people say things that are manifestly wrong or even apparently malicious. That's fine, too. It's a response.
I remember driving home one evening while they were reviewing the papers on the radio. One of the articles was about me separating from my wife. It's a weird thing to listen to a news report about the break-up of your marriage.
The bad reviews get to me, believe me.
Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me.
I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.
Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.
It's irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me. I've lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you're dead.
And yet because of my attempt at sincerity I have been condemned, hooted at, reviled; filthy rumors have been circulated about me, not about my characterizations but about me personally, my private self.
I revise obsessively. It's important to me to have a clean page.
I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.
I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.
Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.
If my history, my indisputable British history, has never been visited, where does that put me? If we are only going to look at things that need a revisit, you are wiping me out of this country's history. That is unacceptable to me.
There was a board game called 'Sorcery,' which is one of my favorites, and I would often revisit the game. It's not a video game, but it definitely stands out in my mind as a game that impacted me.
To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.
