While reading the back jackets of a few new books, I stood next to a guy who picked one off the “Current Fiction” table, and plopped it down again, saying, “The novel is dead. Nobody reads them anymore.”

He wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to his friend, who gave a distracted shrug before they both moved on to the non-fiction.

I wanted to pick up the book and smash it over the guy’s head–or better yet, knock the table over and bury him under a pile of books he claims no one reads–not for making such an asinine remark, but for saying it as if it were an original thought.

“The intellectual is the worst thing there is. He invents things and then he believes them. He decides the novel is dead but then he finds a novel and says he discovered it. If you say the novel is dead, it is not the novel. It is you who are dead.” — Gabriel García Márquez from an interview with William Kennedy

“Painting is dead” “The novel is dead”

Whatever.

Humans have been scrawling pictures and telling stories since the monkeys touched the monolith, these things won’t be dead until we all are dead. While the end of the world is arguably at hand, I think we still have a little while to go. And even if the human race is on the verge of dying out–and the novel along with it–so what? Somebody has to write the last one.

I still plan on writing another book, but I’ve put so much pressure on myself to make it better than the last one, that I haven’t been able to start. It’s silly really. I mean, even if it turns out to be shit, it’s no big deal. I’ve wasted time before.

“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of one’s chair.”– Kingsley Amis