84.23a

“Mailer Calls God the Best Novelist.” Article-interview by Richard Kenyon. Milwaukee Journal, 4 October. On the book tour for 84.17, Mailer talks about how much writing time he has remaining: “Maybe I have 10 years left to write, maybe 15 and that’s stretching it. I don’t know if I want to spend a year or two on journalism, unless the event is enormous and I feel I can bring something special to it.” He also says that after he finished The Execution’s Song (79.14) “I was impressed by how God is a better novelist than the novelist. That is, if I had imagined the book, I would have done certain things with the character and they wouldn’t have been as interesting as the real things that happened with the characters in the story.”