James Patterson Admits His Success Could Seem Irritating: Vanity Fair Interview

By Dianna Dilworth 

jamesPattersonBestselling author James Patterson may have sold more books than anyone else on the planet, but he’s also down to Earth: He’d hate himself too.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which publishes next month. Patterson revealed: “I would be like, ‘Well, what’s this? He couldn’t possibly do what he does…I’d probably be kind of irritated by the guy.”

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Michael Pietsch—Patterson’s former editor who is now C.E.O. of Hachette (the parent company of Patterson’s publisher, Little, Brown)—tells Purdum, “In his case, it’s a drive like I’ve never seen. He’s a very competitive person, but I think he’s competitive with himself. Do I wake up at night wondering if it’s going to stop? We had a meeting today in which I proposed that we might want to hold off a secondary format of a book for some point in the future when there might not be an abundance of them in future years, and he looked at me incredulously, as if ‘When is that going to happen?’”