There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." It's funny. I read something the other day, just out of absolute curiosity; I read Thunderball, which is one of the James Bond books that I would love to have read when I was, I don't know, about fourteen, just sort of thumbing through it for the bits where he puts his left hand on her breast and saying, "Oh my God, how exciting." But I just thought, Well, James Bond has become such an icon in our pop culture of the last forty years, it would be interesting to see what it actually was like. And what prompted me to do this, apart from the fact that I happened to find a copy lying around, was reading someone talking about Ian Fleming and saying that he had aimed not to be literary, but to be literate. Which is a very, very big and crucial difference. So I thought, well, I'll see if he managed to do that. It's interesting, because it was actually very well written as a piece of craft. He knew how to use the language, he knew how to make it work, and he wrote well. But obviously nobody would call it literature. But I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art, but are merely practicing a craft, and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them. I find when I read literary novels--you know, with a capital "L"--I think an awful lot is nonsense. If I want to know something interesting about a way human beings work, how they relate to each other and how they behave, I'll find an awful lot of women crime novelists who do it better, Ruth Rendell for instance. If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins. I feel that the agenda of life's important issues has moved from novelists to science writers, because they know more. I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.
--Douglas Adams in an interview with the Onion AV Club