Wired’s interview with Michael Chabon in the March issue is a love letter to all his literary favorites, from Dickens to Iain Banks.

I had been taught early on in college and graduate school that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I wrote genre fiction…. I might have stood up to it more han I did, but I wanted to be read, and I wanted to receive whatever benefits there were to be received from the people I was in workshop with, and he teachers I was studying from.

And you know, I wasn’t looking for a fight, and it wasn’t like I don’t love F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jon Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov, and Eudora Welty, and all those people. I love their work just as much — if not more in some cases — as Arthur C. Clarke, or Frank Herbert, or whever it might have been. So I had just sort of allowed myself to fall into this channel as a writer that at some point I realized I didn’t want to be limited anymore.

[Thanks to Francis Hamit for the link.]