Julian Barnes

And I just said, well, it's Julian Barnes' new book.

In a rather irritated way.

Yes, and quite a few of them are actually hybrid, which mix autobiography, fiction, nonfiction, art criticism, whatever is relevant to my thinking about the book.

So I've always been quite relaxed about this, but I know that it does annoy some people.

And indeed –

My – the character Julian Barnes is attacked at one point by one of the participants in this love affair and who he hasn't met for 40 years or so.

And she says, I don't like this hybrid stuff you do.

I think you should stick to one thing or another.

And it was rather enjoyable to have a character rebuking me for the book that I was writing.

I sort of enjoyed that.

And I get cross with her and I say, well, you may like or not like one of my books, but I want you to know that I know exactly what I'm doing when I'm writing.

Which is actually – I have heard another writer use more or less those words.

So I sort of pinched them.

A reader has absolute liberty to like or not like your book and to say you shouldn't have written it this way.

You should have written it that.

But usually the complaints and the corrections to it fall on rather deaf ears with most writers.

What you're putting in there is something that you've thought about, you've written a number of times, and you've corrected it and corrected it and corrected it.

So it is what you mean to say.

Yes, when I thought I had a more serious version of it, I decided to write a little sort of memoir, notes to myself in my notebook.

And this is, it only reached about two and a half pages, but these are some of the entries.