Walker Percy, from a 1980s interview in the Paris Review, in which the interviewer says Percy’s work reminds him most of Saul Bellow’s:
I take that kindly. I admire Barth, Pynchon, Heller, Vonnegut—you could also throw in Updike, Cheever, and Malamud—but perhaps Bellow most of all. He bears the same relationship to the streets of Chicago and upper Broadway—has inserted himself into them—the way I have in the Gentilly district of New Orleans or a country town in West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana.
I live in that country town in West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana. I am a writer — not a Walker Percy-level writer, God knows, but a published writer all the same. What a privilege. What a challenge.
What am I going to do with it? I wonder. I mean, I really do wonder.
Did you ever see Win Riley’s marvelous documentary portrait of Percy?
Charles Cosimano 
Brian 
Fran Macadam 
JohnG 
Patrick Shea 
Ken 
Yes. A privilege and a challenge. Well put. I published, too, but I have walked away from it to feed the kids. But it’s still there. Is it wrong to abandon it? I don’t know. I wonder about it a lot. Jump back in the game? What about the kids? Do it on the side? Use the skills to… I don’t know… write for the local historical society?
To the extent that you can keep ‘em fed while doing it, of course do it. For me, the only thing that would provide clarity would be disaster, like my workplace going under, or me getting fired. At that point I’d immediately get a job at the paper mill, if I could get one, and start pitching books.