Writer's quotes - Marquand

John Phillips Marquand once said (or wrote):
When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters.
He continues:
It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

Yes to the first sentence.
but
I don't find that writers for children and young adults become unpleasant at all.  It must be older male writers who write books for adults?  (yes, I've run into some of those.)