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Nicholas Sparks on How ‘The Notebook’ Is Basically Like Shakespeare

Susan Jane Belton’s Greek Side (2007).

Nicholas Sparks, author of best-selling weepy love stories like The Notebook, does not write romance, he’ll have you know. “I write a dramatic epic love story, I write modern-day Greek tragedies, and there’s a big difference between that and romance,” he said at the premiere of Nights in Rodanthe, the new movie based on yet another of his novels about — you’ll never guess — tragic lovers. “You have romance novels, and then you have what I do, more along the lines of love stories like Eric Segal’s Love Story or The Bridges of Madison County, and those are both male writers,” Sparks told us. That sounds like a reasonable comparison. “But you can even go all the way back,” he continued. “You had Hemingway write A Farewell to Arms, the movies of the forties — Casablanca, From Here to Eternity — Shakespeare, and that’s the genre I work in,” he explained. Put into perspective, is there any doubt that Shane West and Mandy Moore are the Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman of their generation?

Nicholas Sparks on How ‘The Notebook’ Is Basically Like Shakespeare