Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

The Wall Street Journal interviews Cormac McCarthy.

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

WSJ: People have said "Blood Meridian" is unfilmable because of the sheer darkness and violence of the story.

CM: That's all crap. The fact that's it's a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That's not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in "The Road" questions and curses?

CM: It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it's meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the Institute. They're just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, "It's really more important to be good than it is to be smart." And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.

WSJ: Do you feel like you're trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways?

CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement.

how women turn to misogyny

Me being the woman turning to misogyny.

Harriet Evans, who writes books like these, complains in the Guardian Book Blog that "an extraordinary amount of bile and patronising comment" is directed toward "commercial women's fiction" which is always labeled "'chick-lit': often a derogatory term used to mean books by young women drinking chardonnay and being silly about boys, without the thought that novels by women about women might accurately reflect their lives and thus have merit or, at the very least, relevance." And that books by men written "in the same vein" are not exposed to bile and patronising comment. [Her examples of this phenomenon, you have to see to believe.] Or, more succinctly: "It winds me up that books about young women are seen as frivolous and silly, while books about young men's lives that cover the same topics, are reviewed and debated, seen as valid and interesting contributions to the current social and media scene."

So what are these books about young women about? Oh, "the diversion it gives hardworking people who want a good read," mostly.

A lot of people did not like various aspects of this post, with quite a few of them focusing on how it's the publishing industry that sucks for making all books by women fitted in pink covers and swirly font. But here are a few of the supportive comments:

Perhaps we should use 'prick lit' for all those bangs and bombs books with the dark as opposed to pink covers?

And please, commenters, don't say sci-fi is patronised or forgotten - I've seen many a serious review of cyberpunk and many a reverential article about the likes of Philip K Dick - well deserved, mind you, but you don't see the same seriousness given to women's work. By the way, Jane Austen - now so revered - was considered lightweight and chicky-chick in her own time.

In reply to the people who object to the pretty covers, please understand that commercial publishing is a business. And in order to appeal to the most readers possible, women's fiction jackets need to actually LOOK LIKE women's fiction. And you're right - there are key markers for this: swirls, confetti, glittery hearts and flowers - to name but a few. But why is this such a bad thing? They might put off a Guardian reader or two, but the fact remains that there are likely several hundred thousand people a year who they delight - because, as any proper chick-lit /women's fiction fan will tell you, when you see those swirls and pretty illustrations, it usually means a novel which'll make you giggle, recognise yourself and people in your life, and maybe even give you that magical bit of escapism. And really -- even if the content is not personally your cup of tea -- what on earth could be wrong with letting other women enjoy that?

This comment is the winner though:

Most strikingly of all, when you take a good look at books from women who have gotten the nominations for big awards in the last few years, you'll notice that the ones by women are almost uniformly either a) in the voice or point of view of male characters or b) self-consciously "about" male themes: war, genocide, revolution. This is not bad, per se. But it does show how deeply ingrained our biases are.

Dear Christ Jesus is all I can say. The same commenter also says, "I would not want to be a young female writer these days." Yeah, sure - because of people like you, bud. This is called shooting yourself in the damn foot. Guess I'll go back to the kitchen now and have me a glass of chardonnay to go with my James McAvoy fantasy, because god knows that's what accurately reflects my life as a woman.

If you need me, I'll be giggling.

There's another post written by one of the writers that Harriet Evans holds up as someone who ought to be taught for A-Level - Joanna Trollope is her name - that compares Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary to today's chick lit (dear God help her), then unleashes this whammo of a get-back-in-your-place piece of reactionary social engineering: "get your relationships right and most of the rest of life assumes its proper proportion."

Damn, so that's all we needed to do to get rid of genocide? Oh, no, wait, I don't care about genocide. Forgot.