Fools Die by Mario Puzo - my favourite part

After long evenings working on the schedule of books to be reviewed and whom to give them to, Osano would drink from the bottle of whiskey he kept in his desk and give me long lectures on literature, the life of a writer, publishers, women and anything else that was bugging him at that particular time. He had been working on his big novel, the one that he thought would win him the Nobel Prize, for the last five years. He had already collected an enormous advance on it, and the publisher was getting nervous and pushing him. Osano was really pissed off about that. “That prick,” he said. “He told me to read the classics for inspiration. That ignorant fuck. Have you ever tried to read the classics over again? Jesus, those old fuckers like Hardy and Tolstoy and Galsworthy had it made. They took forty pages to let out a fart. And you know why? They had their readers trapped. They had them by the balls. No TV, no radio, no movies. No traveling unless you wanted cysts over your asshole from bouncing around on stagecoaches. In England you couldn’t even get fucked. Maybe that’s why the French writers were more disciplined. The French at least were into fucking, not like those English Victorian jerkoffs. Now I ask you why should a guy with a TV set and a beach house read Proust?”

I’d never been able to read Proust, so I nodded. But I had read everybody else and couldn’t see TV or a beach house taking their place.

Osano kept going.“Anna Karenina, they call it a masterpiece. It’s a full-of-shit book. It’s an educated upper-class guy condescending to women. He never shows you what that broad really feels or thinks. He gives us the conventional outlook of that time and place. And then he goes on for three hundred pages on how to run a Russian farm. He sticks that right in there as if anybody gives a shit. And who gives a shit about that asshole Vronsky and his soul? Jesus, I don’t know who’s worse, the Russians or the English. That fucking Dickens and Trollope, five hundred pages were nothing to them. They wrote when they had time off from tending their garden. The French kept it short at least. But how about that fucking Balzac? I defy! I defy! anybody to read him today.”

He took a slug of whiskey and gave out a sigh. “None of them knew how to use language. None of them except Flanbert, and he’s not that great. Not that Americans are that much better. That fuck Dreiser doesn’t even know what words mean. He’s illiterate, I mean that. He’s a fucking aborigine. Another nine-hundred-page pain in the ass. None of those fucking guys could get published today, and if they did, the critics would murder them. Boy, those guys had it made then. No competition.” He paused and sighed wearily. “Merlyn, my boy, we’re a dying breed, writers like us. Find another racket, hustle TV shit, do movies. You can do that stuff with your finger up your ass.” Then, exhausted, he would lie on the couch he kept in his office for his afternoon snooze.