QotD: Novelists

Every writer of note, when I've scratched the surface, turns out to come from a lively context of other writers, correspondents, editors, critics, and literate and argumentative friends and colleagues. This observation has given me my personal definition of a genre — "Any group of works in close conversation with each other." As readers, we tend to encounter only the polished result of that uproar, as the book alone appears in our hand and the context drops away. I'm not sure this is a bad thing — like law and sausages, it may sometimes be better not to watch how novels are made.

Lois McMaster Bujold, "How I Met the Inklings", 2006-08-06