The Paris Review - Interviews

INTERVIEW ARCHIVE INDEX

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JOHN UPDIKE
1968

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas . . . ”

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.”

HELEN VENDLER
1996

“A female who expresses herself decisively seems to this world someone armed with ammunition.”

GORE VIDAL
1974

“One of the reasons that the gifted Hemingway never wrote a good novel was that nothing interested him except a few sensuous experiences, like killing things and fucking . . . ”

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.”

KURT VONNEGUT
1977

On why a person would insert a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his (or her) ass: “In order to bite the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. That's the only reason twerps do it. It's all that turns them on.”

ANDREI VOZNESENSKY
1980

“In Russia I don't need advertising . . . But here, for example, if you stop somebody's car and say, ‘A Russian poet wants to read,’ you hear, ‘What? A Russian poet? Read a book? What?’”

DEREK WALCOTT
1986

“A Calypsonian performer is equivalent to a bullfighter in the ring.”

ROBERT PENN WARREN
1957

“America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America.”

WENDY WASSERSTEIN
1997

“I think there is real anger in life to be expressed, there is great injustice, but I also think there is dignity.”

EVELYN WAUGH
1963

“An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.”

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 . . . ”

EUDORA WELTY
1972

“Once you're into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.”

JESSAMYN WEST
1977

On her childhood scrapbook: “In it, you can see, I have written thirty plots. Across about half of them, I have written, ‘NUTS.’”

REBECCA WEST
1981

“[The difference between women and men is the difference between] idiots and lunatics.”

JOHN HALL WHEELOCK
1976

“Music, perhaps, comes nearest to reality . . . the mathematical relationships within the universe made audible. All the arts tend to that, but in music it seems to succeed . . . ”

E. B. WHITE
1969

“I think that our notion of what we experienced as children is highly infected by whatever is the prevailing philosophy of childhood.”

EDMUND WHITE
1988

“Thoreau [was] a man of some humor along with his bile.”

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
2002

“For me, the truth of the music, the truth of the blues, is immediacy.

ELIE WIESEL
1984

“When I say I don't speak about God, it means theologically, the whole theological art, which is a way of reaching the attributes of God: What is He doing? Who is He?”

RICHARD WILBUR
1977

“A man like Sartre can get a whole book out of a proposition which is, on the face of it, untrue . . . ”

BILLY WILDER
1996

On fighting against didactic intentions: “I've spent a large part of my life trying to sit on it, to keep it down . . . I think the struggle with it may have brought a certain kind of objectivity into my work.”

THORNTON WILDER
1956

On fighting against didactic intentions: “I've spent a large part of my life trying to sit on it, to keep it down . . . I think the struggle with it may have brought a certain kind of objectivity into my work.”

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
1981

On being single: “You know what happened to poor Norman Mailer. One wife after another, and all that alimony. I've been spared all that.”

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
1964

“Eliot . . . wanted to be regular, to be true to the American idiom, but he didn't find a way to do it. One has to bow down finally, either to the English or to the American.”

ANGUS WILSON
1957

“I don't think it's the novelist's job to give answers. He's only concerned with exposing the human situation, and if his books do good incidentally that's all well and good.”

AUGUST WILSON
1999

“I don’t write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that’s not why I write. I work as an artist. All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics.”

JEANETTE WINTERSON
1997

“I can't find a model, a female literary model who did the work she wanted to do and led an ordinary heterosexual life and had children. Where is she?”

P. G. WODEHOUSE
1975

“The thing to do is to say to yourself, 'Which are my big scenes?' and then get every drop of juice out of them.”

TOM WOLFE
1991

“It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.”

TOBIAS WOLFF
2004

“All I need is a window not to write.”

CHARLES WRIGHT
1989

“If one has to write poorly before one can write well . . . and if that can be extended to read that one has to write deplorably before one can write extraordinarily well, then I definitely started in the right place for the latter.”

JAMES WRIGHT
1975

“Human beings are unhappily part of nature, perhaps nature become conscious of itself . . . I love Nietzsche, who called man 'the sick animal.’”

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO
1965

On the Day of Poetry, a Russian festival:
“ . . . Moscovite poets assemble . . . in front of a huge crowd of eight or ten thousand people. . . . There have been years when snow fell that day, but the crowd did not disband; it stood listening in the storm.”

MARGUERITE YOUNG
1977

“At the age of eighteen all young poets are sure they will be dead at twenty-one . . . ”

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
1988

On her refusal to publish with Virago Press: “I did not want to be published by them because they publish only women. It reminds one of ladies' compartments in nineteenth-century trains . . . ”

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The Paris Review Interview Archive

Since 1953, when the first issue of the magazine appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, our Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: the Paris Review interview. More than fifty years—and more than three hundred interviews—later, the archive continues to grow with each new issue of the magazine. In November 2006, the first volume of a four-book set of The Paris Review Interviews was celebrated by reviewers across the English-speaking world. In tandem with this publishing project, we offer here online a complete index of every interview ever published, searchable by author and by date—as well as a substantial sampling of the archive’s finest interviews, posted in their entirety. Taken together, these conversations with novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, biographers, journalists, and critics constitute what Salman Rushdie calls “the finest available inquiry into the ‘how’ of literature.”

To read Philip Gourevitch's introduction to the first volume of The Paris Review Interviews, click here.

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