CHINUA ACHEBE
1994
On art and politics: “I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.” |
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CONRAD AIKEN
1968
Recalling a dinner with T. S. Eliot: “He was wearing a cowboy hat, and we all got plastered . . . He couldn't walk, for his ankles were crossed, so Valerie lifted him into the taxi.” |
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EDWARD ALBEE
1966
“Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf . . . who's afraid of living life without false illusions.” |
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NELSON ALGREN
1955
“I once heard two junkies arguing about my book, and finally one guy says, “If he really knew what he was talking about, he couldn't write the book, he'd be out in the can.” |
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WOODY ALLEN
1995
“I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable.” |
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YEHUDA AMICHAI
1992
“The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time—a play on comparative literature—is comparative time.” |
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KINGSLEY AMIS
1975
“Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European . . . “ |
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MARTIN AMIS
1998
“During signing sessions my queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them.” |
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A. R. AMMONS
1996
On readings: “It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater: to see what the beast looks like in person.” |
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MAYA ANGELOU
1990
“If you are going to write autobiography, don't expect that it will clear anything up. It makes it more clear to you, but it doesn't alleviate anything.” |
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JOHN ASHBERY
1983
“I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.” |
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MARGARET ATWOOD
1990
On foreignness: “In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire, or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.” |
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LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
1994
“I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.” |
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W. H. AUDEN
1974
On hippies: “What I do like about them is that they have tried to revive the spirit of ‘Carnival.’ But I'm afraid that when they renounce work entirely, the fun turns ugly.” |
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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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JAMES BALDWIN
1984
“After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So—Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.” |
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J. G. BALLARD
1984
On the dangers of writing too much: “By the eighteenth book, one has a sense of having bricked oneself into a niche, a roosting place for other people's pigeons. I wouldn't recommend it.” |
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RUSSELL BANKS
1998
“It was pretty easy to picture myself at his [Castro’s] side. He was, in some ways, the good father.” |
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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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JOHN BARTH
1985
On teaching creative writing: “Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level—let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus—and it's at that point you need coaching.” |
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DONALD BARTHELME
1981
On the difficulty of writing about sex: “Faint equivalents can sometimes be found. . . . Or
it can be rendered obliquely—an adolescent’s mental image of his
or her parents making love, which must be something on the order
of crocodiles mating.” |
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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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SAUL BELLOW
1966
“I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.” |
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JOHN BERRYMAN
1972
“I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.” |
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ELIZABETH BISHOP
1981
On winning the Pulitzer Prize while living in Brazil: “There was one vegetable man we always went to. And he said, “You know, it's amazing! Last week Señora (Somebody) took a chance on a bicycle and she won! My customers are so lucky!” |
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HAROLD BLOOM
1991
On therapy patients: “Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers.” |
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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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HEINRICH BOLL
1983
“Behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined.” |
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YVES BONNEFOY
1994
“Since thanks to poetry the world is closer, and its unity more perceptible, we feel more part of that unity: like the leaf of a tree, even if it falls off the branch, in an instant that is eternal. So what is death?” |
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JORGE LUIS BORGES
1967
On color: “When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw was yellow, because it is the most vivid of colors. I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.” |
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PAUL BOWLES
1981
“I wanted to meet [other artists]. I suppose I simply felt that I was taking pot shots at clay pipes. Pop! Down goes Gertrude, down goes Jean Cocteau, down goes André Gide.” |
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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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HAROLD BRODKEY
1991
“Being an object of curiosity (and rivalry) is very peculiar when you’re no longer young. You really spend an awful lot of your time in New York just being confused about how to act.” |
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JOSEPH BRODSKY
1982
“[Persecution mania] is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.” |
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WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
1996
“I hate to use the word in this context, but I must . . . my novels celebrate the cold war, and therefore the passions awakened by this titanic struggle are really a narrative obligation.” |
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ANTHONY BURGESS
1973
“. . . if [other writers] can spend—as one of my American girl students did—ten pages on the act of fellatio without embarrassing themselves, very good luck to them.” |
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
1965
“The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure.” |
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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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JAMES M. CAIN
1978
“Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.” |
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ERSKINE CALDWELL
1982
“Southern writers must have learned the art of storytelling from listening to oral tales. I did. It gave me the knowledge that the simplest incident can make a story.” |
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HORTENSE CALISHER
1987
“. . . I used to think I lacked confidence. Now I think I knew I had nothing much yet to write about. Or not perspective enough to know what was there.” |
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ITALO CALVINO
1992
On starting a new novel: “Every time I must find something to do that will look like a novelty, something a little beyond my capabilities.” |
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TRUMAN CAPOTE
1957
On his childhood: “I was thought somewhat eccentric, which was fair enough, and stupid, which I suitably resented . . . ” |
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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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RAYMOND CARVER
1983
On teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Conference: “The entire time [John Cheever and I] were there . . . I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters. We made trips to a liquor store twice a week in my car.” |
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JOYCE CARY
1954
“Critics write about my vitality. What is vitality? As a principle it is a lot of balls. The life-force is rubbish, an abstraction, an idea without character.” |
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CAMILO JOSE CELA
1996
Interviewer: “You [think] that not only should a writer have enemies but that he should actually cultivate them?” Cela: “Yes, so that they help him move up the ladder.” |
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LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE
1964
“Savy, the biologist, said something appropriate: In the beginning there was emotion, and the verb wasn't there at all . . . ” |
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BLAISE CENDRARS
1966
“If [the crowd of expatriate poets in Paris] was influenced it was rather by the ambiance, the air of Paris and the way of living in France, rather than by this or that French author.” |
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JOHN CHEEVER
1976
“Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.” |
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AMY CLAMPITT
1993
On the Sexual Revolution:
“ . . . some very plausible stuff is being written by women in a way that most men are not doing . . . ” |
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JEAN COCTEAU
1964
“. . . Appreciation of art is a moral erection; otherwise mere dilettantism. I believe sexuality is the basis of all friendship.” |
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BILLY COLLINS
2001
“Until recently, I thought ‘occasional poetry’ meant that you wrote only occasionally.” |
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JULIO CORTAZAR
1984
“Literature is . . . a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.” |
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MALCOLM COWLEY
1982
On Hemingway: “He always had trouble with plots because he wasn't so much filling out a plot as he was making a journey or progression, day by day.” |
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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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ROBERT CREELEY
1968
Describing the effect of hallucinatory drugs on the creative process: “[It’s] terrific! That's at least what I'd like to say.” |
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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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ROBERTSON DAVIES
1989
On a “favorable” review in the Times of London: “[It] began with these chilling words: ‘To speak of a good novel from a Canadian writer sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.’” |
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SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
1965
“ . . . I've shown women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.” |
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DON DELILLO
1993
“There's the shattering randomness of [the Kennedy assassination]: the missing motive, the violence that people seem to watch simultaneously from a disinterested distance.” |
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JAMES DICKEY
1976
On Allen Ginsberg: “I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else . . . ” |
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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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JOAN DIDION
1978
“Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. . . . Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.” |
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ISAK DINESEN
1956
“I'd say [to the African villagers] ‘Once there was a man who had an elephant with two heads. . .’ and at once they were eager to hear more. ‘Oh? Yes, but Mem-Sahib, how did he find it, and how did he manage to feed it?’” |
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E. L. DOCTOROW
1986
On fiddling with scenes from history: “Well, it's nothing new, you know. When President Reagan says the Nazi S.S. were as much victims as the Jews they murdered—wouldn't you call that fiddling?” |
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J. P. DONLEAVY
1975
On fan recognition: “My wife thinks I'm constantly walking around thinking I'm famous and that someone's recognized me when all they're looking at is my possible bad taste in clothing.” |
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JOHN DOS PASSOS
1969
“Our development and that of the Soviet Union have many things in common except that the Soviet Union is motivated by this tremendous desire for world conquest.” |
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MARGARET DRABBLE
1978
“The whole question of free will and choice and determinism is inevitably interesting to a novelist. Are your characters puppets in the hands of fate or are they really able to make free choices?” |
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FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY
1987
“Being forced at the age of twenty-two to sit at a typewriter on the night shift of United Press and turn out trade stories in a manner of minutes—this took some of the fear [of writing] away. Like five percent.” |
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JOHN GREGORY DUNNE
1996
“When I did Dutch Shea, Jr., I knew the last line was going to be, ‘I believe in God.’” |
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LAWRENCE DURRELL
1959
“I think that, as I say, in England, living as if we are not part of Europe, we are living against the grain of what is nourishing to our artists, do you see?” |
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LEON EDEL
1985
On biographers: “James invited his future biographers to seek him out in what he called the ‘invulnerable granite’ of his art. That's so Jamesian—the ‘invulnerable granite.’” |
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ILYA EHRENBURG
1961
“[Flaubert said] ‘If you want to describe courage, do not become a soldier; a lover, do not fall in love; a drunkard, do not drink wine.’ There is . . . a brilliant refutation of this theory: Stendhal.” |
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T. S. ELIOT
1959
On the role of “place” in his work:
“ . . . putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America.” |
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STANLEY ELKIN
1976
“We all die, yes? We suffer, correct? The score keeps changing, is it not so? And Mommy holds us on the teeter-totter before we can sit upright on chairs.” |
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RALPH ELLISON
1955
“[African-American folklore] is like jazz; there's no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it.” |
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