Here's Colm Tóibín:
What's more important in fiction: story or style?
I'm against story. I remember [the painter] Howard Hodgkin really disliking being called a colourist. People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.
And if he did get it from his grandmother? People like a good story anyway - they do. Including his. But, yes, you need to be able to write as well. I also enjoyed this bit:
Do you read your reviews?
Not if somebody has told me in advance that it isn't good. The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych."
