Elmore Leonard on what it means to write

“I’m glad I’ve always had a commercial bent. I want to make money doing this. I had no dream of going to the Iowa Writing School, or whatever it’s called, and learning to write that way. When The New Yorker guy asked me to send him a story, I said, ‘I don’t write New Yorker stories. The stories I write I can always understand.’ And I can. My stories always have a definite ending, a payoff. I think he was a little insulted.”

—Elmore Leonard, in an interview with Keith Taylor for Witness