EB: Stephen King talks about that there's five or so great writers, a group with Shakespeare and a few others. There's a number of very good writers, and then there's just a lot of writers who are just okay. Do you think it's possible to improve as a writer, to start at one place and end in a better place, or is the talent just there and you have to develop it, or it's simply not there and it's garbage?

RBP: I think if it's not there, it's garbage. I think that writers can improve. I mean, a lot of things happen to you as a writer that are not particularly literary that help you improve. The end of poverty being one. I mean, money is not destructive of a writer, but poverty is, because you have to work nights! And the confidence that comes from knowing that what you write will be published gives you freedom to move around, makes you willing to try new ideas and invent things. And the simple practice of it: you do it, and then you do it again, and then you're probably going to get better. If you don't get any better, there's probably something a little wrong with you!

But basically there are those who can and those who can't. And then there are those who are so clearly superior that you don't have to argue about it. I could not, for instance, have written The Great Gatsby. And I could not have written the long version of The Bear. There's two pieces that I simply do not have the talent to do. I don't think I'm a better writer, I think I'm a little wiser now. I started when I was 41, when my first novel came out, and now I will be 73 in September. I must have learned something, you know? And that translates into the books, I assume. But basically, you can or can't, and I don't think it's a teaching skill.

I made some attempt to teach fiction writing for a while, with no success. Of course, they may have been great writers and I may have been a lousy teacher! That's one possibility. Yes and no: it's a digital thing. And that's what I mean, you can almost tell at the first page if they sound right or don't sound right. Just as I don't know what note somebody hit on the piano when it was flat, but I know it was flat. I don't know what they hit, whether it was a D Minor, or whatever it is. It either sounds like music or it don't. That's what you do on the first page of somebody's manuscript.