Salon.com: At the publisher's luncheon for your new book you said that you were starting to feel that you didn't have to write fiction anymore. Is that true? Why do you think that many writers think that writing fiction is the crowning achievement of their career?

Geoff Dyer: I think the answer would have to be historical. Now more and more is being done in the "neither one thing or the other" realm, so I'm happy to be one of the people opening up that territory. It sort of bugs me that some of the most conventional or least novel things being written are actually novels. So often it seems to me that the whole form of many novels is close to a cliché. You notice it in the last 40 pages of a book, when you feel it all being driven towards its novelistic apotheosis and climax.