no!

From an After the MFA interview with Edward P. Jones. This has just about made my day, and it's only 10:30am:

I don’t have much patience — you know, people will say, “Oh, you know I just let the characters take over…” I think that’s so much junk. It comes out of your mind, it’s in your brain, whether or not you’re going to acknowledge it. And sometimes people will say, “Well, do your characters live on after you finish?” No! They don’t do or say anything I don’t tell them to do or say. You know what I mean?

People want to make it seem like there’s some sort of magic. There is no magic. It’s “once upon a time, Jack and Jill went up the hill…” And you don’t need any fancy language, you know?

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I'm loving some of Jone's fiction, but the way he talks about writing and the literati is sort of unintentionally hilarious.