PAUL AUSTER
2003
“Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.” |
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BERYL BAINBRIDGE
2000
“I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I've never been put down by a man, unless I deserved it, and have never felt inferior.” |
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JULIAN BARNES
2000
“Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex—that's one basic test of competence, after all.” |
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ANDREA BARRETT
2003
“I’m not adopted. But that longing and that sense of absence . . . are perhaps other ways of expressing the actualities of my family. Different facts, same emotions.” |
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LOUIS BEGLEY
2002
“I’m not ashamed to admit that occasionally I’ve found myself aroused by my own depictions of sex.” |
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ROBERT BLY
2000
“One man wrote me, saying, ‘You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!’” |
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T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
2000
On life imitating art: “The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome.” |
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A. S. BYATT
2001
“I don’t see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.” |
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PETER CAREY
2006
On sitting down to write: “It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.” |
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ANNE CARSON
2004
“At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.” |
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BILLY COLLINS
2001
“Until recently, I thought ‘occasional poetry’ meant that you wrote only occasionally.” |
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JIM CRACE
2003
“My father had osteomyelitis—his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder. . . . But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all . . . ” |
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GUY DAVENPORT
2002
“The point of view I take is the point of view of Diogenes, which is that when a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man. The thing about technology is that it owns us.” |
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JOAN DIDION
2006
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.” |
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PAULA FOX
2004
“I recall lying on a bed, looking at a manuscript on the floor as I reached to turn pages, and thinking to myself, I must mean everything I say, every word.” |
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MICHAEL FRAYN
2003
“If I were to give serious practical advice to a young writer about how to succeed I would say: ‘Write the same book, or the same play, over and over again, just very slightly different . . .’” |
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JACK GILBERT
2005
“When I started out I wouldn't write a poem until I knew the first line and the last line . . . I was a tyrant and I was good at it.” |
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ROBERT GIROUX
2000
On meeting J. D. Salinger: “Then he said . . . ‘I'd like you to publish my novel.’ I said, ‘What novel?’ He said, ‘Oh, it isn't finished. It's about a kid in New York during the Christmas holidays.’” |
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JORIE GRAHAM
2003
“[There] is all this narrowing to a now in which there’s only room for effect, not enough room for cause—and so no duration in which to experience personal accountability.” |
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DAVID GROSSMAN
2007
“I need, physically need, several hours every day to be alone and write.” |
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BARRY HANNAH
2005
Barry Hannah on self-hating Southerners, .45 caliber teaching tools, and overcoming alcoholism: "I was often taught that everything is worth it for art. Everything. It was a cult." |
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SHIRLEY HAZZARD
2005
“Housman's reference to the hairs rising at the back of one's neck as one reads a poem remains a test of quality. Such response is individual and cannot merely be generalized, dismantled, controlled.” |
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AMY HEMPEL
2003
“I assemble stories—me and a hundred million other people—at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.” |
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GUSTAW HERLING
2000
“Can you imagine the sort of letters Henry James would have gotten had he written The Turn of the Screw in the first person?” |
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GEOFFREY HILL
2000
“One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?” |
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RICHARD HOWARD
2004
On having been a precocious child: “Of course, what precocity gave, socialization took away, and I hope the rather nasty designation ‘precocious child’ faded away before (at least!) adolescence.” |
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STEPHEN KING
2006
“They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.” |
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CAROLYN KIZER
2000
On feminism: “It's a point of view; it's a stance; it's an attitude towards life that affects, and afflicts, everything I do.” |
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AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
2007
“I’ve always felt that there’s a very thin membrane between madness, alcoholism, and/or destitution and being an OK American guy in a comfortable heated apartment with meatballs and a decent Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge.” |
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JONATHAN LETHEM
2003
“I’m gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.” |
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DEREK MAHON
2000
“Raymond Chandler [has said]: ‘No art without the resistance of the medium.’ But the resistance mustn't be gratuitously imported for tactical purposes.” |
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NORMAN MAILER
2007
“As you grow older, there’s no reason why you can’t be wiser as a novelist than you ever were before. You should know more about human nature every year of your life.” |
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JAVIER MARIAS
2006
“To think of posterity nowadays is ludicrous because things do not last. Books seem to last more than films or records but even they do not last very long.” |
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HARRY MATHEWS
2007
“I discovered you could write prose the way you do poetry. You don’t approach it from the idea that what you have to say is inside you. It’s a materialist approach, for want of a better word. You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.” |
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J. D. MCCLATCHY
2002
“Lowell, who was the most exhaustingly literary person I’d ever met, I’ve always considered the master of rhetoric. He told me once that he worked over a line ‘until it sounds like Lowell.’” |
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IAN MCEWAN
2002
“Moments of crisis [in my writing] were to become a way of exploring and testing character. How we might withstand, or fail to withstand, an extreme experience . . . ” |
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RICK MOODY
2001
“It’s important for me to have someone read the work who won’t let me get away with things. A bullshit detector. Essential to the process.” |
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LORRIE MOORE
2001
“A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.” |
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PAUL MULDOON
2004
“I’m pretty interested in general knowledge, and science and arcane knowledge. Much more interested in that than I am in Literature with a capital L. Or at least as interested.” |
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HARUKI MURAKAMI
2004
“Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoyevsky and Chandler together in one book.” |
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LES MURRAY
2005
“It’s a deep dirty secret, in Australia, that I’m the wrong class to be a poet.” |
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ORHAN PAMUK
2005
“I am notorious for my political comments—most of which are picked up from international interviews and shamelessly manipulated by some Turkish nationalist journalists to make me look more radical and politically foolish than I really am.” |
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RICHARD POWERS
2003
On how music is an intimation of death: “You start the song
. . . and you know, even as you round the corner of the first verse, that it’s only going to last for four and a half minutes. All you can do is keep moving to it.” |
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
2005
“I thought it odd that storytelling and literature seemed to have come to a parting of the ways. . . . A story doesn’t have to be simple . . . but, especially if it’s multidimensional, you need to find the clearest, most engaging way of telling it.” |
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JORGE SEMPRUN
2007
“When I write, I make my memories tangible, and in this way I can get rid of them. On the other hand, writing is but a ploy to convulse memory back into life.” |
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CHARLES SIMIC
2005
“A ‘truth’ detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.” |
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JAMES TATE
2006
“The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out. . . . I put down mountain, then I'd go, no—valley. That's better.” |
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HUNTER S. THOMPSON
2000
“Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?” |
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LUISA VALENZUELA
2001
“Journalism requires a horizontal gaze; it is absolutely factual. On the other hand, fiction requires a vertical gaze—delving deeper into the non-facts, the unconscious, the realm of the imaginary.” |
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WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
2000
“Well, the best way [to improve your female characters] is to have relationships with a lot of different women. What's the best way to do that? It's to pick up whores.” |
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WILLIAM WEAVER
2002
On translating Italo Calvino: “I had problems with Calvino because he thought he knew English . . . At one point he fell madly in love with the word feedback . . . ” |
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JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
2002
“For me, the truth of the music, the truth of the blues, is immediacy. |
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