LB: They do better with genre fiction, at least.

AW: They can do all of that shit. Take over daytime television, too. They are deeply into refrigeration.

LB: Are you really as relaxed about the future of the industry as you sound?

AW: I am as calm as I’ve ever been in my life. I was concerned for a while. I think everything’s going to work out.

LB: What would you like to see happen?

AW: The biggest single problem since 1980 has been that the publishing industry has been led by the nose by the retail sector. The industry analyzes its strategies as though it were Procter and Gamble. It’s Hermès. It’s selling to a bunch of effete, educated snobs who read. Not very many people read. Most of them drag their knuckles around and quarrel and make money. We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.

LB: Is that a widely held belief among agents?

AW: No, I don’t think so.

LB: You grew up with a father who worked in publishing. Was there a disdain for mass-market fiction in your house?

AW: Not really. I think what I wanted to know was: Is it possible to have a good business? The image I had was, if you represented writers who are good, they and you were doomed to a life of poverty and madness and alcoholism and suicide. Dying spider plants and grimy windows on the Lower East Side. On the other side of my family, there were bankers. So I wanted to put the two together.

LB: How did you put the two together?

AW: What I thought was: If I have to read James Michener, Danielle Steel, Tom Clancy, I’m toast. Fuck it. This is about making money. I know where the money is. It’s on Wall Street. I’m not going to sit around reading this drivel in order to get paid less than a clerk at Barclays. That’s just stupid. So if I want to be interested in what I read, is there a business? Answer: Yes, there is.

And the way to make it a business, I figured out, was: One, if you are going to represent the best, you must represent a preponderance of the best. You’ve got to be very aggressive about representing the right people. Two, it has to be international and seamless.

LB: Has it gotten more difficult to represent good books in recent years?

AW: Some prices are coming down, but they are not coming down that drastically. There are a lot of markets. Over there on that table there is Alaa Al Aswany out of Egypt, number one there. Karl Ove Knausgaard, appearing in translation, was number one in every Scandinavian country—six volumes for a couple of years. Paolo Giordano and Roberto Saviano, who were recently number one in Italy. This is fairly viable.

LB: Are there any commercial best-sellers that interest you? Like say, The Art of Fielding.

AW: Didn’t read the book. We did not engage when the opportunity to represent it arose.

LB: I’ve heard you don’t deal much with young writers.

AW: Young writers, when they see me, it’s like meeting Ronald Reagan.

Sometimes I go in to pay my respects. Everyone is perfectly polite, but you can tell they’d be a lot comfier if I’d just get the fuck out. So I do.

LB: Do you like book fairs?

AW: The Frankfurt Book Fair is my idea of heaven.

The London Book Fair is a sort of squalid thing. The agents are in an agent center and it’s ghastly. Like being in a primary school in Lagos. It’s a bunch of agents sitting together at primary school tables.

LB: It’s hard to imagine you wandering through the digital section, with all the e-reader displays and Amazon people.

AW: It’s like driving through a bad neighborhood. I just keep focused on the road and hope to arrive in the country.

LB: Someone told me [the Hollywood firm] Creative Artists Agency recently wanted to buy you.

AW: We looked at it.

You end up understanding that a merger would put this company in the hands of someone for whom the company wasn’t very important. I’m much more interested in figuring out how to make this place last with the same standards for two hundred years.

LB: What do you lose sleep over, at this point?

AW: I was nervous a few years ago.

But I don’t expect this agency to be out of business in the next one hundred years.

I am optimistic about Penguin Random. It will need a lot of product to feed its size. I think it will help sustain the industry—not only itself, but others. If you eat all the grass on the hill, eventually you don’t have any topsoil, Mr. Bezos.

I think the balance sheet of publishers will strengthen, and then, through negotiation, the balance sheet of writers will strengthen.

Unless you’re a terribly bad writer, you are never going to have too many readers.

LB: Would you want your children to be literary agents?

AW: I don’t think it’s their inclination.

LB: Why not?

AW: Probably life with father. I’ve probably paid a little less attention to my children than I have to the publishing industry.

LB: If you weren’t a literary agent, what would you be doing?

AW: I don’t have any other skills. If the industry dies, I die with it.

Laura Bennett is a staff writer at The New Republic. This interview has been edited and condensed.