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Vile Bodies

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INTERVIEWER

Whom do you read for pleasure?

WAUGH

Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner.

INTERVIEWER

And Raymond Chandler!

WAUGH

No. I’m bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don’t care for all the violence either.

INTERVIEWER

But isn’t there a lot of violence in Gardner?

WAUGH

Not of the extraneous lubricious sort you find in other American crime writers.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of other American writers, of Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner, for example?

WAUGH

I enjoyed the first part of Tender Is the Night. I find Faulkner intolerably bad.

—Evelyn Waugh, the Art of Fiction No. 30