Chris Womersley

I just find his eagerness and relish to put the best and worst characteristics of all his characters on the page extremely interesting and invigorating and sort of thrilling.

Roth has kind of an energy as a writer of almost someone that I kind of don't remember encountering much before.

You know, in some ways the crushes come less frequently the older I get.

I don't know whether that's because I've become a, you know, you just sort of get a little bit more inured to things or whether...

You've kind of run out of things.

But I did – another sort of book that I encountered many years after everyone else is, of course, Moby Dick, which I only read about a year ago.

And I had tried to read it, you know, when I was young and it just – wailing and it just sort of never did much for me.

But I just thought it was the most incredible thing I've ever read.

And, you know, great books like that or great writers like that have a sort of a dual –

effect on me, if you like, in the sense that they thrill me and excite me.

And I just think, oh, my God, look what literature can do.

But at the same time, I can't help but compare the paucity of my own talent to theirs.

You know what I mean?

This sort of sense of like, well, what's the point?

If Moby Dick's been written, then, you know, we might as well just sort of give up.

It didn't make me think I should have done this because I think there's also a kind of a case for certain books at certain times in your life.

You know what I mean?

Like I suspect there's very, you know, I probably tried to read Moby Dick when I was 20 and I was a pretty kind of reasonably well-read person, I suppose, even at 20.

But I don't think there's many 20-year-olds who would get as much out of it as you do in later life.

And the same could perhaps be said for Roth in the sense that, you know, he deals with things on such a scale that seem to encompass everything.