I read through this thread thinking the same thing (re: the arguing).

It was a fairly intimate article providing an insight into the habits and life of JF and I found it slightly disconcerting that people were so quick to criticise what seems to be a personal choice.

You can digest a movie much faster than a novel, so it's easy to see why you'd avoid novels if your time was limited.

But a movie is significantly less content than a novel. If you read manga instead, the time invested would be about the same.

(And of course, neither are as intellectually stimulating as a well-written novel. Which is the point of reading them, for me anyway.)