Nicholas Sparks interview - not for those with weak stomachs

Coming to the end of The Power of One - this book is moving very slowly. I got the job at the library, so my next choice will be a love story. In the meantime, here is something that should interest you, if you are a lover of books and therefore hate Nicholas Sparks (I have yet to meet anyone who embodies one without the other): Read at your own risk.


Other than the part where he compares himself to Shakespeare and trashes the incredible Cormac McCarthy (somewhere, post-apocalyptic fiction lovers are gathering their weapons), my favorite section in here has to be the following:

'"I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were called the Greek tragedies. A thriller is supposed to thrill. A horror novel is supposed to scare you. A mystery is supposed to keep you turning the pages, guessing 'whodunit?' A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance. What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms." Asked what he likes in his own genre, Sparks replies: "There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do."'

Despite his almost violent trashing of Cormac McCarthy, he states, "I do not like to say bad things about others." When he is prompted about his prior insults, he quips back, "He deserves it." And laughs. Someone please put this cocky, overpaid, literature pulverizing idiot out of his misery. Nicholas Sparks is becoming the Paris Hilton of the literature world. He's like the patchy, smelly stray cat that keeps walking around the neighborhood. And as long as teenage girls keep feeding him, he'll never go away.