Cormac McCarthy: Would you wish the Nobel Prize off on a friend or an enemy? 

Who should be the next American Nobel Prize winner?

CORMAC McCARTHY: Would you wish the Nobel Prize off on a friend or an enemy?

What would you have done, do you think, if it hadn’t been for writing?

CORMAC McCARTHY: I think I can say that if I hadn’t been a writer I’d have been what I have been all my life anyway: one more unemployed person of dubious character.

From “Don’t Everybody Talk at Once! (The Esquire Literary Survey).” Published in Esquire, August 1986.

The “article” consists of a ten-question questionnaire Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills sent to around fifty American writers. These are the only two answers from Cormac McCarthy.