Whom do you read for pleasure?

Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner.

And Raymond Chandler!

No. I’m bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don’t care for all the violence either.

But isn’t there a lot of violence in Gardner?

Not of the extraneous lubricious sort you find in other American crime writers.

What do you think of other American writers, of Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner, for example?

I enjoyed the first part of Tender Is the Night. I find Faulkner intolerably bad.

—Evelyn Waugh, the Art of Fiction No. 30