Interviews
The Art of Nonfiction
“I think that one never completely moves beyond the pull of the personal in any human encounter. But I think that when journalists remember that the interview is a special sort of encounter, and withhold some of their natural friendliness, they don’t lose anything by it.”
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."
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."
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.”
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."
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."
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