Interviews
The Art of Theater
“I'm not a very inventive writer in the sense of using the technical devices other playwrights do—look at Brecht! ... I find myself stuck with these characters who are either sitting or standing, and they've either got to walk out of a door, or come in through a door, and that's about all they can do.”
All Interviews
Nicholson Baker
2011
"There are all kinds of books I’d like to write that seem to be out of my grasp."
Ann Beattie
2011
"Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock."
Ray Bradbury
2010
"You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices."
Dennis Cooper
2011
"I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I’ve studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it."
R. Crumb
2010
"It knocked you off your horse, taking LSD. I remember going to work that Monday, after taking LSD on Saturday, and it just seemed like a cardboard reality."
Samuel R. Delany
2011
"I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn’t black."
Bret Easton Ellis
2012
On American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman: “The more he acquires, the emptier he feels. On a certain level, I was that man, too.”
Louise Erdrich
2010
"It’s because you’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way."
James Fenton
2012
“What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.”
Jonathan Franzen
2010
"When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well."
Alan Hollinghurst
2011
“I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.”
Michael Holroyd
2013
Michel Houellebecq
2010
"I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think."
Susan Howe
2012
“I often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across.”
Imre Kertész
2013
Hermione Lee
2013
Mark Leyner
2013
“The book attained a mind of its own, a subjectivity or an autocatalytic machinelike quality.”
John McPhee
2010
"With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read."
David Mitchell
2010
"Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice."
Norman Rush
2010
"I must love big novels, because that's what I've written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe."
Wallace Shawn
2012
“I love going to plays. There’s a subconscious side to it, obviously–some people like to be spanked for XYZ psychological reasons, and I like to go to plays, and I can’t entirely explain why.”
Terry Southern
2012
“I don’t know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can’t print that.”
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