I write for the money says Colm Toibin

The Irish novelist Colm Toibin (pictured) has put the cat among the literary pigeons by claiming that writing is no fun and that he only does it for the money. Toibin, 53, the author of six novels including The Heather Blazing and The Master, made his claim during a Q&A interview with the Manchester Review, an online arts journal published by the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing, where Martin Amis is professor of new writing.

Fellow novelist M J Hyland, a creative writing lecturer at Manchester, was putting the questions. When she asked Toibin: "Which of your books did you most enjoy writing?" he answered: "No enjoyment. No, none."

And when she asked: "What do you enjoy most about your life as a writer?" he said: "The money. I never knew there would be money."

The question is whether or not Toibin was speaking tongue-in-cheek. The American writer Joyce Carol Oates, asked by the Guardian today for her reaction, admitted that it was rare for a writer to acknowledge that he writes for money, since most literary writers don't.

But she said that the real motive for writing fiction is "inaccessible to interviewers" and urged readers to remember that DH Lawrence "warned us to trust the tale, not the teller ­ the teller of fictions is likely to be a liar."

She goes on to explain why Toibin might have invented his answer. "Darwinian evolutionary psychology suggests that none of us really know what has made us what we are, still less why we behave so eccentrically as we do; when we are pressed to explain ourselves, we invent," she said.

"In the Renaissance, poets claimed repeatedly that they wrote for posterity ­ to be 'immortal'. In religious communities, the creation of any art was for the glory of God. In a capitalist society, one is likely to claim that one writes for the same purpose that everyone else produces a product - for money."