Fail better: What makes a good writer?

[Otto]

Fail better

What makes a good writer? Is writing an expression of self, or, as TS
Eliot argued, 'an escape from personality'? Do novelists have a duty?
Do readers? Why are there so few truly great novels? Zadie Smith on
literature's legacy of honourable failure

Saturday January 13, 2007
The Guardian
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1988887,00.html