David Gilmour Part Three: December 3, 2002
Epp: I reread the ending to Back On Tuesday last week and was really impressed by it. I thought the last few pages were really touching, the bit where he's watching his ex-wife finally come back to him and he finally realizes, after so many years, that it's possible to miss someone without wanting them back. It just reminded me of the times in my life when I'd suddenly snap out of it and become scared by all the time I'd wasted pointlessly pining over something or other.
So, I thought that bit was pretty insightful.
Gilmour: Thank you.
Epp: On page 214 of that book you write: ‘I felt as if I'd spent my life stealing out of white rooms down dark roads, and every time I'm convinced that some night I'm going to stumble across something, a happiness as big as the sun. But it's a lie, of course. There's nothing out there. But I go out anyway, I can't bear not to, because if I try to go back to bed and turn out the light it feels like the whole tide of life might just take that very second to crash by my door and if I don't get out there now, I'm going to miss it.' That passage almost feels like it's the germ for the stance of the prototypical Gilmour protagonist, searching for something, some big answer to some unknown question...
Gilmour: Yes, yes. And it may sound ‘spiritual' or something, but it's also based on the rather youthful belief that there is something out there that actually can change your life. Part of me says, Well, look at Darrell's story. He goes to a bus station, meets a girl, and some outside action really did change his life. And nobody can argue with that, your life was this and then it was that . And I think the guy in Back On Tuesday , I think that he thinks that there's something like that out there, and that it actually can change your life. And he's right. There actually is, if your life needs changing. I think there's nothing more depressing in the world than people who won't act on their own unhappiness. So while I think this guy might be a bit naive and desperate to go out every night looking for it, I like the notion that he won't let sadness settle on him like some kind of dust. He continues to go out every night with the belief that tonight he might meet the right girl, or tonight might be the night that something happens.
Epp: It's interesting that you used the word ‘spiritual' there. Something I was planning on asking you about was the fact that your books have a strongly religious tone—
Gilmour: Yes.
Epp: --in the way the narrator doesn't let his moments just slide by unnoticed. He stops himself and carefully examines each one. He believes they're special. He really seems to believe that each second of life is worth paying careful attention to. That idea, coupled with the ‘questing' nature of the books.
Gilmour: That's an interesting thing you just said. I just submitted my new novel, Not Fade Away , to my editor at Random House, and she wrote me back and said, I like the first half, and I don't like the second half. And she's right, I know she's right. Because the first half was organic, and the second half was an idea. I'm not good with ideas, what I'm good at is an organic narrative, one episode flowing out of another, things associating in their own particular way. Sparrow Nights is the most flawless book I've ever written because there's almost no ideas in it. Things just tumble from one to the other. There's an absolutely organic sense of flow there. Whenever I try to think when I'm writing, I almost invariably get in trouble because I'm not smart that way. Anyway, my editor spotted this problem, and I told her I'd be happy to throw out the second half of the book, but I wasn't exactly sure about what to put in its place. She said, It's not so much the spiral of your character that interests me, it's what he says about the spiral as it's happening to him. And it was a great thing to hear, because it also let me off the hook for a plot. She was saying, Don't get all fucked up about the plot here, because that's not interesting. What's interesting in this book—and she probably thinks this about all of my books—is what the character says about the events that are happening to him, not the events themselves. And that sounds, to me, like what you're saying. In my books, a moment doesn't have to be a big plot moment to be one of the best parts of the book. It's actually what my narrators say about what's happening to them that makes my books interesting. Because, when you think about my books, almost nothing ever happens in them. They are the most plot-impoverished books ever published. They're almost invariably guy sort of gets a girl, loses her, sort gets her back, end of story. What's interesting is that in the course of that, he reveals his soul by commenting on anything that happens to him. And I think that's one of the reasons that some people treat the books more lightly than they should. It looks as if I just write anything that crosses my mind, put it down, make a smart remark on it, and move on, as if the two or three years of hard work I spent on the book never happened. Yes, I write these moments and I comment on them, but I go through twenty examples of each moment before I arrive at one which is not only interesting in itself, but truly revelatory. And that's why it takes me so long to write these seemingly-effortless books. I pound away at them until they sound as inevitable as a confession in a bar.
Epp: What your editor said makes sense. If a writer exerts too much force imposing a plot onto a book's protagonist, the book ends up sounding phony. Because, whenever you try to impose a heavy-handed design onto your own life, it never works, some surprise always comes along, so why would it work in a book?
Gilmour: Maybe it works if you're a better artist than I am. Certainly The Great Gatsby is an example of an idea being imposed on life, and it's done with such great artistry that it actually passes for real life. I'm not as talented as Fitzgerald was. I can't create to that degree. What I can do is be aware of and articulate about the most private inner stirrings inside of me. I can't come up with a story if you put a gun to my head, but I'm very good at knowing how I'm feeling, and describing it. And my theory is that if you're good at knowing how you're feeling, you're good at knowing how everybody's feeling. My girlfriend said to me the other night, ‘You know what else you could have done with your life? You could have been a fantastically charismatic cult leader. Because you really are extraordinarily capable of describing your feelings and making them feel like everybody else's.' I think that's one of the reasons that women like me. It's not because I'm a great-looking guy, but because, unlike most males, I'm very aware of how I feel, and I'm very eager to talk about it. And women like that because that's what they do.
Epp: That's probably a big part of why I liked the books, too. I always found that books that were heavily-plotted but light on the characterization just took too much effort to get through. It feels like the characters are only there to make the plot happen, and they're all too busy to ever tell you anything about themselves, so it just comes down to, ‘Oh, is it the guy with the blue hat who's supposed to defuse the bomb, or is it the guy with the beard?'
Gilmour: There's a great piece of criticism that I read about Chekhov's stories. The guy said that the wonderful thing about Chekhov's characters is that they forget that they're characters in a story, and they actually start living, all on their own. That's a great description, because Chekhov truly feels like you've captured random life in a bottle. His characters forget that they're supposed to obey a plot or a theme, and they just wander off into realness.
Epp: I remember reading a bunch of Aldous Huxley's novels, and they seemed like a textbook example of what not to do, in the sense that I often got the feeling that his characters existed not as people, but as mouthpieces for ideas. He may have had a high IQ, but he wasn't a great novelist.
Gilmour: Right. It has an unmistakable feel of fraudulence to it. Even the most underdeveloped grade eleven student goes, ‘This isn't the real thing. This didn't happen.' There's a great story about Chekhov. He went to the theatre with a friend, and he was watching Ibsen's play, The Doll House, and he turned to his friend and said, ‘But life isn't like this is at all!' And he was correct, and that's why Ibsen is minor, and Chekhov is major. A child can spot fraudulence in literature immediately. My son is unerring in his instincts. He made that observation about my new novel before my editor did, and on exactly the same paragraph. He said, ‘Dad? I think everything after the introduction of this character needs work. I just wasn't as interested in it as the other stuff.' And when I sent my manuscript to the head of Random House, she singled out exactly the same paragraph. The point being, people have an unerring instinct for real life, and for real storytelling. Which brings us back to Canadian literature. I do think that if people were organically connected to the reading experience, they would see these books as the crashing bores that they really are. It's like a theatre audience. You go to a Toronto theatre show and you realize that the people who put on these shows are no longer aware of the word ‘entertainment.' They are no longer connected to the idea that theatre should be an entertaining experience. Plays are always far too long, and they're not well-written enough to sustain that kind of length, and you realize that when people go to the theatre now, they expect to be bored. It's an integral part of the experience. And I sometimes think that when people read Canadian literature, an integral part of that experience is also to be bored, that you feel at home with a Canadian novel when it starts to bore you. I know that sounds flippant, but I'm not sure that I'm wrong.
Epp: That's probably part of the reason why some people are turned off by your books. They like the safety of that boredom, and they aren't expecting or wanting anything too raw, they're looking for an experience that's a bit more soothing, like a warm bath.
Gilmour: I don't know. It'll be very interesting to see where these books will be in twenty years, to see how they speak to the next generation, because I think I can almost write this generation off. I feel as if I've almost had my shot at this generation of readers, the Baby Boomers, and that this particular literature did not catch on with them.
Epp: Well, Moby Dick is hailed by many as the Great American Novel, but it was also the book that ruined Herman Melville's career. He spent the last decades of his life as a customs agent, very poor, and when he died none of the major papers carried his obituary.
Gilmour: That is a haunting story. I'm not a huge fan of that book, but to be completely uncredited and ignored...I mean, if I wrote Moby Dick and everybody said ‘Just give it up,' I can't imagine getting up the steam to write another novel. Novels are such an act of faith, sitting down for years writing them requires so much faith, that a kick in the pants like that is something that, after a certain age, you just would not get up from.
Epp: Maybe this next question sort of relates to the ‘spiritual' thing we were talking about. It seems like the Gilmour protagonist only ever values something when it's over, only ever values a person when he or she is gone—
Gilmour: Yes.
Epp: Christian spends a lot more time reminiscing about his time with Harrow than he ever did in his company, and Gene, Bix, and Darius only understand the importance of their lovers after they've been dumped by them. Why is that the case? Is that a trait you also possess?
Gilmour: I thought, until I read Marcel Proust, that I was the only one to be lured by the notion that things that you can no longer have, are the things that you must have. Then I started to read Proust. I didn't start reading Proust until I was fifty, I came to him very late. And his central thesis, essentially, is that sexual desire and possession cannot coexist. You can only have one or the other, but you don't get the girl and want to fuck her. You can only want to fuck the girl you don't have, or don't completely have, or who's unfaithful to you or who might be unfaithful to you. A lot of my romantic life was spent with women I cared for but didn't love. And, in the course of not being in love them but sleeping with them, I became sexually addicted to them. So when they left, what I had was my sexual addiction to them, and the ache of its now-unfulfilled appetite, masquerading as love. I think the point is that the reason the guy in How Boys See Girls lost all these women was because he was never all that in love with them in the first place, but he grew attached to them while he was in the act of looking for someone better. And when they went, he discovered that not only did he not have someone better, he didn't even have them anymore. And then he spent his time trying to get them back. It's like a guy who buys a plane ticket to a foreign country, arrives in the foreign country and finds things are far worse there, and spends all his time desperately trying to get home. Eventually, he gets home, and he realizes the whole thing has been an unbelievably gratuitous exercise in creating a difficultly and overcoming the difficulty, so you can end up in exactly the same place you were in six months ago. With the characters in my book, there's a sense that he never really wanted them at the time he had them, and there was only his attachment to them that haunted him. And all those women ever had to do to keep him loving them was stay away. And the biggest mistake they could ever make would be to come back. I'm glad you noticed that; I think it's an interesting point.
Epp: I think the only reason I noticed it was because I've always wished that there was a way, when you were doing something for the last time, that you could be given a signal that would tell you it was the last time, just so you could pay a bit more attention to it.
Gilmour: Right. There was a long riff in Sparrow Nights about the last time: the last time you read a book, the last time you turn out the light, the last time you kiss somebody goodbye. All these things, for all of us, there will be last time. There will a last time I have lunch with my son, a last time I sleep with my girlfriend...it all has to end, because we all have to end. But it's haunting to know that in most cases we won't know when that time is, and that our lives are full of last times that we didn't recognize. I met a friend in university, and we'd get together almost daily. University ended, and I didn't see him for six or seven months. Then I ran into him on the street one day and we went and played pool, chatted, and had a really nice time. I said, ‘Okay, that's great. I'll see you later.' I never saw the guy again. Ever. And I didn't know that that was the last game of pool I'd ever play with him. And I wish I'd known that. I wish I'd known, I would have given it more attention. (laughs) And that's my psychiatric therapy session for the day.
Epp: In or around the last two decades of the 1800's, you had Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Conrad, and Maupassant. And when I look around at the current literary scene, it kind of seems like a rip-off. What do you think of it?
Gilmour: I'm not very interested in Canadian literature, I have to admit that. I find it very boring. Not inept, not untalented, just extraordinarily boring. I think Elmore Leonard is the most interesting American writer, and I think Ian McEwen is the most interesting English writer. What those two guys have in common is: there's no fat on any of their books. And when you talk about serious Canadian literature, and the most serious American literature as well, you're talking about skinny chickens walking around in tubs of lard. Gigantically overwritten books, books that are twice as long as they should be. Elmore Leonard was asked how he know he knows what to cut, and said, ‘I just cut the boring stuff,' and I know exactly what he means by that. Ian McEwen is the same: no fat. When we talked last time I was kind of in a dip about my books, particularly Sparrow Nights , which I thought was a very good book. It got all the critical praise I could ask for, but it didn't get the commercial success I wanted. For about a month, it was a painful experience, a rather prickly, irritating experience. I'm actually coming out of that now, because that's a dead end street. There's no way that kind of thinking is going to help your work. You walk around with acid in your stomach and your fists clenched and a permanent sense of entitlement, a sense that life has gypped you and given prizes to people less worthy than you. Whether or not that's true, as a writer you can't go through the world thinking like that. It will poison your heart and poison your work. And when we talked last time I was sort of in the grips of it. I had an uncontrollable sense of resentment. It was like a flu I couldn't shake. But I notice that I feel physically different about it now. I haven't made a decision to be a better human being; the feeling just passed. And I find my interest and enthusiasm in my own work returning, which kind of proves what I said, which is that that kind of thinking poisons you right to the heart. So I'm not interested in knocking inferior writers right now. Although, last month I couldn't get enough of it. Does that answer your question?
Epp: I was hoping there'd be a way for us to talk about your peers without it just sounding like sour grapes on your part...
Gilmour: Well, I'm certainly not going to ‘name names' for you, Darrell, because there are a number of Canadian writers whose work doesn't interest me at all who have been very kind to me, and have publicly endorsed by books, and helped me. So, I'm not going to turn around and shit on them in an interview just to make myself sound more interesting.
Epp: Well, in one of your earlier answers you mentioned the tone of seriousness that infects Canadian literature.
Gilmour: Yes.
Epp: And my complaint as a reader was that it seemed like, for a book to be taken seriously, it had to be really static, light on the story, heavy on the atmosphere, and any book that actually had some real movement to it couldn't be high art. And I was wondering why that was the case.
Gilmour: I actually have no idea. I don't understand who Canadian writers are writing for. When I write, I have a reader in mind, a guy like you...when I read Canadian novels, I don't know who they're written for. I can't imagine what image the writer is seeing in his head when he writes them. But as I've said before, I think different generations of readers require different sorts of nourishments. You know, you eat a certain kind of food for a long time and eventually you crave a different kind of food. My guess is that it's possible that my books will come into fashion some time years down the road, not because they're better books, but because there will be an appetite for books with less fat on them that speak more directly to people. Books that speak more to people's lived experience, rather than this imagined ‘Canadian' experience where people somehow always get better. You'll notice that one of the depressing things about Canadian literature is that characters almost invariably improve through the course of a novel. They don't get worse and end that way. One nice thing about Elmore Leonard's novels is that they often end with characters being either worse off than they were before, or about the same. That's also true for Tolstoy's novels, for Chekhov's short stories. The idea is that people aren't essentially changed by events too much. Sometimes people get worse, and mostly they stay the same. Because human behaviour is largely dictated by habit.
Epp: That was something that seemed really felt phony to me, when all the characters seem on a one-way track to a better place, a more enlightened state.
Gilmour: Yeah, and it's absolute bullshit. My experience in life is that a lot of people get worse as they get older. What they do is, they give in to their habits as if those habits are rational responses to the world. Every so often you see people who actually try to break their habits. You can't change the impulse of your behaviour; a violent man is always going to have violent impulses. What you can change is the behaviour around that impulse. The only real change that strikes me as sincere is not a change of heart, because I don't think people change in their hearts, is a change in what they do about their hearts. In other words, I came from slightly violent people, and when someone contradicts me flat-out, my first impulse is to slug them, even if it's a woman or a child. I have learned, over time, not to act on that impulse. But I still have that impulse.
Epp: What you said about people getting worse is interesting. I can see how, if I stay at my current job that I hate, I might really have to fight to avoid turning into a bitter, angry old guy.
Gilmour: But there's also something in your makeup that's deeper than that, things that you respond to in the same way over and over again. It's why Christmas is such a debacle all over this country. Families get together, and behaviour that isn't exhibited out in the world starts to come out. Children start to behave the way they really are with their parents, even though they're forty years old. That's why Christmas is so filled with tears, and drinking, and quarrelling, and suicide. Families get together and everyone indulges in those impulses because there's an atmosphere where you're allowed to. If you want to see how little you've changed throughout the course of your life, have dinner with your parents. And you don't have to behave badly, you just have to recognize the impulses that are running through your body while you're having dinner with them. And you'll realize—unless you're an exceptional human being—that you've changed almost not at all from the time you were ten.
Epp: I guess that's kind of sad.
Gilmour: I don't think it is, because you can change your behaviour. You don't have to act on your impulses. You don't have to get into a fight with your mother like you did when you were fourteen, because you recognize she's eighty-five now, and she's not going to change and you aren't going to fix her. What's sad is when people think that because they feel something, it's right, and they should act on it. That is the formula for a tragic life, because people will just repeat the same mistakes over and over again. They'll lose wife #5 for the same reason they lost wife #1. Life just repeats itself over and over again unless you make an attempt to change your behaviour. But all that doesn't mean that I'm not an angry, violent man underneath all this, that I'm not lecherous, that I don't covet every fourteen-year-old girl who walks by my house. I have simply decided that I'm not going to live like that. I'm not going to be punch people in the face and I'm not going to cheat on my girlfriend because I know where it all goes. But I still have the impulses to do all that.
Epp: But if you aren't getting angry, then you aren't an angry man. To be an angry man you would have to be acting on those angry impulses.
Gilmour: I agree with you. Acting on the angry impulses cultivates more anger. First of all, I think most of my anger is just about...vanity. It's really about a sense of entitlement. Most of my teeth-grinding, psychotic scenarios can be traced back to some wound to my vanity, and that's all. If I could remove my vanity from the equation, I would have almost no problems in the world.
Epp: I did notice when I was around nineteen that the depressing and sometimes suicidal thoughts I'd spent so much time entertaining were just being caused by... narcissism and boredom.
Gilmour: You're absolutely right. It's just narcissism. And when I talk about this peevish month-and-a-half when I didn't like going into bookstores because I would find something that would wound me—my books would be in the wrong place, or they wouldn't have enough of them—I noticed that sometimes it was as if the world was paying me back for my vanity. I realized that I had gone out searching for some opportunity to stroke my vanity. I'd gone into the library over here and thought, ‘Well, why don't we just see how many of my books they have?' And then I discovered—as you always will—that you never get a satisfactory response to something like that. They've either got five of them and they should have six, they've got two of them and they should have four, or the three that they have aren't the right three, and I would emerge from the library completely enraged! I realized that this was a completely self-inflicted wound. I had taken a shotgun, pointed it at my foot, pulled the trigger, and wondered about why I was in such pain. I was kind of asking for it. My trips into bookstores, which were supposedly just out of curiosity, were some kind of an attempt to feed my vanity. I watched Paul McCartney on television the other day. I liked listening to the songs, but I thought there was some very unattractive vanity on display. I understand the need to play music because you're a musician, but it wasn't about that. You see these people with their banners saying WE LOVE PAUL, and all the people singing along, and then at the end you see that the executive producer of the piece was Paul McCartney himself. That means he sat in the screening room and okayed all those shots. Now that is just breath-takingly and unattractively immodest. Not only that; at the age of sixty, he should have outgrown that shit by now. It wasn't just that he wanted to show himself playing his music to people, he wanted to show people how much people loved him. And that's very sad, because as Proust said—and we've talked about this before—all life is a march toward oblivion. Paul McCartney's going to wind up on the shelf, with the rest of them, irrelevant. He said at the top that he likes to tour every nine years, and I thought, he's an applause junkie, he's not going to be able to stay away for nine years. He'll come back in three years, it won't be as good, he'll do it again after that, and in the end it will be as Proust said. He's going to flatline, and eventually people aren't going to care. And I don't want to end up like that. I don't want to end my life on Earth waving my arms above my head, making faces at the crowd, doing one last tour for one last piece of applause. You sort of feel that Paul McCartney—and there's a bit of him in all of us—will be propped up on his deathbed trying to sing ‘Yesterday' to the priest giving him his last rites, because he just can't let it go. I mean, this television show was embarrassing. I liked watching the music more than I thought I would, although I really don't care much for most of McCartney's songs. I always preferred Lennon.
Epp: Definitely.
Gilmour: ‘Fool on the Hill,' ‘Eleanor Rigby,' ‘The Long And Winding Road,' ‘ Penny Lane ', ‘Hey Jude'—I hated all those songs. There's something very dull at the heart of them. But it was interesting that Paul could have had so much of worldly acclaim, and have realized so very little about the unimportance of it. I found that TV special very bracing when I saw it. It was like someone threw a glass of cold water in my face and said, “Look, stop being like this. Stop this number about so-and-so's books are doing better than mine, just stop it. Because there is the finished product of that kind of vanity. And it's deeply, deeply unattractive.” Also, he was so breath-takingly un-self-aware . He didn't seem to understand how transparently his vanity was screaming for more applause.
Epp: It is strange how someone who has heard more applause than almost anybody else on the planet still has a greater need to hear applause than people who have never heard any at all.
Gilmour: I know. And when I saw Paul backstage with his girlfriend, mugging for the cameras and trying to be funny, I got it. I understood why John Lennon despised him, why he treated him like a fool, like a little schoolboy. Lennon would have seen that.
Epp: You hear ‘ Penny Lane ' and then you hear ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' and you can't picture these two guys even pretending to get along.
Gilmour: Absolutely. They were both monumental egos, and they were both monumentally talented. And it probably wasn't Yoko Ono that broke up the Beatles, it was probably just—well, it probably was Yoko, because I think Yoko actually is a cunt. I've interviewed her, and yeah, she's a cunt. Lennon was a classic Proustian guy, he had to have what he couldn't have, and Yoko Ono was, in that strange Asian way, unhaveable. He could never ‘fix' her, she was never completely his, and I think he was intrigued by that. Anyhow, we're getting off-topic.
Epp: Right. You told me awhile ago to remember to ask you at some point about what happened when you went to New York .
Gilmour: Oh, that was the beginning of the ‘peevish time.' I went to New York to do a reading. I looked forward to it a lot. My literary dream was to be a writer in New York . So here I am at the age of fifty, I'm invited to go down there and do a reading from Sparrow Nights . They're paying the whole shot and putting me up in a hotel and I'm going to be reading at a Barnes & Noble, and it all sounds great. But like everything else in your life that you look forward to, it never turns out the way you think it's going to, and in fact, everything else in New York was great, except the very thing that I thought was going to be fabulous about it. I went to my reading. I found myself there with a couple of other Canadian novelists. One of them had won a very prestigious literary prize, and the other had been nominated for it. They were both very nice guys. And then they came out and they started to read. And as they started to read, I had this sinking feeling in my stomach, because there was nothing in what they were reading that interested me even remotely. I could barely listen to it. Like I said, their books had either won or been nominated for an award, and my book hadn't been nominated for anything. And I had this sense of absolute futility.
Sparrow Nights and Lost Between Houses , I can't do any better than that, I can't write any better than that. And I don't seem to be getting anywhere with them. And these other books, that just don't speak to me at all, seem to be prospering and selling and winning prizes. It was the first time in a long time that I had allowed myself to indulge in that peevish, small-time, embittered little-man jealousy. I went up and did my reading, and just blew them away. The entire audience came out of its fucking torpor and was just dancing. I wasn't surprised; I knew my stuff was that good, and I knew that this other shit was like a twenty-pound valium. It was as if the room had gone from black and white to colour. I sold a lot of books; it was a very enthusiastic audience. And I went out and fulminated at my poor girlfriend for twenty minutes, getting all the poison out of my system, about the injustice that the literary world had done to me. Look at these cocksuckers who are boring everyone to death and selling books and winning prizes, and here am I, the virtuous talent relegated to relative obscurity, compared to these other guys. My girlfriend knew better than to interrupt me and twenty minutes later all the poison had passed out of my system and we had a great time. But it was one of life's ironies for me, because this was something I had looked forward to since I was twenty: going to New York as a writer. Everything else in New York —having dinner with my girlfriend, going to Ground Zero, fucking her in the hotel room—was just a blast. The one bad thing about the trip was something I had waited thirty years for. And that was the beginning of my peevishness. From that point on, almost every day something bruised my literary vanity, and that lasted for about a month or two. And now, like a passing case of acne, it's starting to slide away. And now I'm starting to think, ‘Look at the reviews of your book, look at the way you live, you really haven't had a bad kick at the can. You haven't done so badly.' It's like some strange fit has kind of passed. And I don't think it's just because I'm fucked-up or vain, I think I'm probably just like all the other writers in the world. I interviewed John Updike once and I said to him, “What are you pissed off about? What have you been gypped out of?” He said, “Well, not really anything.” I said, “No, seriously. You've written forty novels, you've won a bunch of National Book Awards, but is there something that bothers you?” And he said, “Well, all right.” And then he mentioned a literary prize that I had never even heard of before. He said he should have won that prize two or three times, and it still really irritated him that he hadn't won it. Here's a guy who's won all kinds of awards, he's one of the most pre-eminent American authors of the twentieth century, who's just like me, grinding his teeth at the injustice of it all. He told me, quite candidly, that there were critics who, when they panned his books, he actually wanted dead. He daydreamed about killing them! So here we are in December now, and I actually feel like I had a fit of vanity and now I've been exorcised of it. It's the Paul McCartney syndrome.
Epp: He's horrible.
Gilmour: He's also resentful. You know that the day they made Mick Jagger a Sir was the blackest day in Paul McCartney's life. He must have thought, ‘Well fuck it, if he's got it, it's not worth it! Now there's Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Michael Caine...' You know that he's even managed to spoil that honour for himself. You can spoil all the triumphs of your life and trivialize every accomplishment you've ever made if you look around long enough and hard enough.