Extracts from an Interview with Alexander Theroux

Here are extracts from the interview with Alexander Theroux by Steven Moore from Center of Book Culture.org
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_theroux.html
I really respect this man's ideas ideas. Compare and conrtrast this with my previous entry onJames Patterson.
AT: I put the writers of bumphable, ready-to-wear prose, calculated to sell, guaranteed not to shock, in the same category as artists who can't draw. There is a lack of bravery and a lot of fraud in them. I have tried never to write a book that didn't attempt something new in the way of narrative technique. Writing is an assault on cliche. I find little to admire in writers who make no attempt at originality. (I remember, among other things, effortfully working to make the perambulations in London of Roland McGuffey recapitulate the lines of the Union Jack.) It's death commercially, of course, but I knew from the beginning that I was too opinionated, literate, and unconventional to enjoy a widespread reputation. It doesn't bother me in the least. I've always been too busy to make money. I'm among the freest people I know.
AT: Write the books you should, be the person you are. I wanted to write a "roman d'analyse," for example, with "An Adultery." A new genre. Plot didn't interest me in the least. Character is plot, anyway. Start delineating a figure--merely describe a person--and he or she will begin to act, do things, go in a particular direction. I set the novel up as a syllogism and purposely wrote balancing rhythmic and arhythmic sentences. I think its rewards come only if you're willing to think, to come to terms with what I set out to question, sort through, analyze. (pause) Nothing there for the Leon Uris crowd--beach readers, military minds, people who flip pages to pass time. I wanted the book to be what it was, no self-promotion, no hook for a publishing scheme. There's a mystical passivity in refusing the entrepreneurial.
AT: Someone said there are only 2400 people in the world worth writing for, anyway. I wonder if that's true. But readers are so lazy. The several books I've written have won me no fame. I do not complain of this, any more than I boast of it. I feel the same distaste for the "popular author" genre as for that of the "neglected poet." I marvel at writers who write a book a year, approaching mass production. I apologize for not being terribly impressed
AT: All is never said. Knowledge is involved everywhere. You have to shape the truth. " Everyone applauded, and I'm glad he did," is ugly, but grammatically correct, while "I don't think anybody knows what they are" is the opposite. I'm only saying that we have to try to contest what we want to come to terms with, whether readers or writers. It depends on how much intensity a person has, how curious he is, and whether he or she wants to live a life of meaning. I have always tried to tell my students, especially those who every June apply to law school or business school in such a perfunctory way, as if, you know, those were the only alternatives -a condition abetted in the Ivy League by the army of secular and soulless mechano-moronic professors and deans who view education solely as a means of entering the labor force--that the point of living is trying to figure it out. My ideal reader burns with what Walter Pater described as a "hard gem-like flame." (pause) In any case, Tolstoi somewhere speaks of the psychological law which compels a man who commits actions under the greatest compulsion to supply in his imagination a whole series of retrospective reflections to prove his freedom to himself. It sounds a bit didactic, but it explains one aspect of writing.