Writer as Something Else
Wilfred Sheed's New York Times Book Review piece in which six writers, Mailer among them, say what they might have been had they not written; Mailer answers 'a lazy lover with women working for me.'
“Writer as Something Else,” an article by Wilfred Sheed in the New York Times Book Review (4 March 1973), in which six writers — Mailer, Philip Roth, Jean Stafford, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Murray Kempton — answer Sheed’s question about what they might have been had they not become writers. Mailer says he cannot think of what he might have been “except a lazy lover with women working for me.” Reprinted in Sheed’s The Good Word and Other Words (Dutton, 1978).