ROBERT FAGLES
1999
On assembling a Homeric football team: “I know who'd be thrown off the team as captain. Agamemnon. He's a disaster as a leader! Achilles is the best broken-field runner. And the one I'd most like as a coach is Penelope.” |
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WILLIAM FAULKNER
1956
“The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.” |
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ROBERT FITZGERALD
1984
On slang: “The test of a given phrase would be: Is it worthy to be immortal? . . . ‘I guess I’ll split’ is not going to be immortal and is excludable, therefore excluded.” |
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SHELBY FOOTE
1999
“The institution of slavery is a stain on this nation's soul which will never be cleansed . . . There's a second sin that's almost as great, and that's emancipation.” |
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RICHARD FORD
1996
“Once Tobias Wolff and I gave a reading out in North Dakota, and a man came up to tell us he read our books during his lunch breaks, sitting on his tractor out in the wheat fields.” |
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E. M. FORSTER
1953
“I am more interested in works than in authors. The paternal wish of critics to show how a writer dropped off or picked up as he went along seems to me misplaced.” |
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JOHN FOWLES
1989
“Oxford in the late 1940s was . . . a happy dream, an alternate world . . . in a sense a novel we had heard of, but never actually read until then.” |
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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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MAX FRISCH
1989
“[There’s] the idea that by birth you are born a sinner. Why? I didn't ask to be born. Why do I have to be born on a blacklist?” |
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ROBERT FROST
1960
“. . . Why don't critics talk about those things—what a feat it was to turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this?” |
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CARLOS FUENTES
1981
“I remember going [in 1939] to see a
. . . a film in which Richard Dix played Sam Houston. When the Alamo came around, I jumped up in my seat shouting ‘Death to the gringos! Viva México!’” |
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ATHOL FUGARD
1989
On how art effects social change: “I like that image of art dropping down through the various layers of the individual’s psyche, into dreams, stirring around there and then surfacing later in action.” |
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WILLIAM GADDIS
1987
“In the past I've resisted [interviews]
. . . because of the threat of questions from someone unfamiliar with the work itself—‘Do you work on a fixed schedule every day?’ ‘On which side of the paper do you write?’” |
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MAVIS GALLANT
1999
“. . . If [you] want to publish the lie perceived behind the interview, [you have] to write fiction.” |
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
1981
“The laws of gravity can be figured out much more easily with intuition than anything else. It's a way of having experience without having to struggle through it.” |
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JOHN GARDNER
1979
“While my father was milking the cows my mother would come out and read something to him—Lear, say—leaving out the part of whomever my father felt like being that day, and he'd answer his lines from the cow.” |
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WILLIAM GASS
1977
“Getting even is one great reason for writing.” |
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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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ALLEN GINSBERG
1966
“. . . Thoreau [said], Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Well there are millions of poems of quiet desperation and they are all published in The New Yorker.” |
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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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NADINE GORDIMER
1983
“When I was twelve
. . . I'd write little book reviews. There was a review of . . . Pepys's Diary . . . and I didn’t see that there was any difference between [the kids’ books I read at the time] and . . . Pepys's Diary.” |
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ROBERT GOTTLIEB
1994
Michael Chrighton on Gottlieb: “He . . . was not above saying, I don't know if you can do it this way . . . which of course would drive me into a fury of effort
. . . And it was only years later that I thought, You know, I think he probably said that on purpose.” |
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WILLIAM GOYEN
1976
“It is enraging to work in words, sometimes; no wonder writers are often nervous and crazy: Paint seems to be a more benevolent, a more soothing and serene-making medium.” |
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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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GUNTER GRASS
1991
On the extinction of dinosaurs: “When they died, they died in a very clean way
. . . This will not happen with human beings. When we die there will be a terrible breath of poison.” |
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ROBERT GRAVES
1969
On the origins of Wife to Mr. Milton: “I'd always hated Milton, from earliest childhood, and I wanted to find out the reason. I found it. His jealousy. It's present in all his poems . . . ” |
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HENRY GREEN
1958
On the merits of subtlety: “After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now.’ . . . The oblique approach in middle age is the safest thing. The unusual at this period is to get anywhere at all—God damn!” |
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GRAHAM GREENE
1953
Asked whether he takes characters from real life: “No, major characters emerge: Minor ones may be photographed.” |
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DAVID GROSSMAN
2007
“I need, physically need, several hours every day to be alone and write.” |
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JOHN GUARE
1992
“Novelists [are] only a couple of hundreds of years old. Playwrights [are] a couple of thousands of years old.” |
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THOM GUNN
1995
“All young men are unhappy. That's why they identify so strongly with Hamlet. They're unhappy in a formless kind of way . . . [they’re] undefined, and being undefined is rather painful.” |
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DONALD HALL
1991
“At lunch Robert [Bly] said, ‘Well, Mr. Hall, what do you think of having a poet for a son?’ As I feared, my father didn't know what to say; poetry was embarrassing, somehow. So I said, ‘Too bad your father doesn't have the same problem . . . ’” |
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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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ELIZABETH HARDWICK
1985
Explaining her remark that Henry James was “the greatest American female novelist”: ”Sometimes I try to lighten the gloom of discussions but I notice that no one laughs. Instead you see a few people writing down the name.” |
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JIM HARRISON
1988
“You don't write—an artist doesn't create, or very rarely creates—good art in support of different causes.” |
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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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SEAMUS HEANEY
1997
On poetry’s power to suspend violence: "It can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities." |
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ANTHONY HECHT
1988
On being called for congratulations by Jack Kerouac after beating him out for the Prix de Rome: “I was abroad at the time, but he was, my parents wrote me, genial and sincere and a little high.” |
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JOSEPH HELLER
1974
“Often when I am very tired, just before going to bed, while washing my face and brushing my teeth, my mind gets very clear . . .” |
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LILLIAN HELLMAN
1965
On the difficulties of writing about McCarthyism: “Few people acted large enough for drama and not pleasant enough for comedy.” |
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MARK HELPRIN
1993
On writer’s block: “If an electrician said, I have electrician's block. . . . He would be committed. One thing would be certain, and that is that his paralysis in the face of his work would have only to do with him, and not with his craft.” |
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ERNEST HEMINGWAY
1958
“. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love.” |
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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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JOHN HERSEY
1986
“I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence . . . so much as it's been
. . . the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.” |
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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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JOHN HOLLANDER
1985
“Literature is not different from life, it is part of life. And for someone like myself, The Odyssey is as much a part of nature as the Aegean.” |
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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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TED HUGHES
1995
“The poetry shock that hit the U.K. in the sixties started before the Beatles. Sylvia responded to the first ripples of it. In a sense, Ariel is a response to those first signs, and she never heard the Beatles.” |
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ALDOUS HUXLEY
1960
“I don't believe for a moment that creativity is a neurotic symptom. On the contrary, the neurotic who succeeds as an artist has had to overcome a tremendous handicap. He creates in spite of his neurosis, not because of it.” |
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DAVID IGNATOW
1979
“I'm not a Buddha in the sense of I can sit under a tree for a thousand years. Who can? The climate doesn't allow for it, anyway . . . ” |
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EUGENE IONESCO
1984
“I detest and despise success, yet I cannot do without it. I am like a drug addict if nobody talks about me for a couple of months I have withdrawal symptoms.” |
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JOHN IRVING
1986
“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.” |
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CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
1974
On writing for the entertainment industry: “I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent. But are you going to sink or swim?” |
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P. D. JAMES
1995
“I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!” |
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TAHAR BEN JELLOUN
1999
“There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.” |
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JAMES JONES
1958
“Politics is like having diabetes. It's a science, a catch-as-catch-can science, which has grown up out of simple animal necessity more than anything else.” |
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