When asked by The Paris Review to describe the ideal reader of his works, Anthony Burgess came up with a highly specific characterization:

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age…

After taking a moderately more serious approach to the question, Burgess admitted that yes indeed he does like to have a wide audience, but acknowledging that there are limitations:

I like to devise a plot that can have a moderately wide appeal. But take Eliot’s The Waste Land, very erudite, which, probably through its more popular elements and its basic rhetorical appeal, appealed to those who did not at first understand it but made themselves understand it. The poem, a terminus of Eliot’s polymathic travels, became a starting point for other people’s erudition. I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror…