“Making connections most people don’t make. That’s probably the secret of producing interesting new art, new stories. That’s what we read the stimulating writers for, why the good classics remain revelatory and forever informative. Always something new you hadn’t noticed before. The regurgitators are probably useful, in that they familiarise the novel, as it were, to the middle-brow audience. This gradually brings the originals to their attention, usually after they are dead. There’s no point in looking for Sunday Times approval or using it, or academic approval, as a yardstick. If you do something a bit fresh, make those fresh connections, you are more or less guaranteeing yourself a cheap flat on the margins of the city or a cardboard box in the middle.”
Michael Moorcock in an interview in 3AM