Interviews
Interview of the Day
All Interviews
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Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
2015
“The good effect of translating is this cross-pollination of languages.”
Aharon Appelfeld
2014
“My nights are a nightmare, quite often, but the nightmares are rich. I nourish myself by those nights.”
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
"Writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock."
Robert Caro
2016
“There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts. The more facts you get, the more facts you collect, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.”
Emmanuel Carrère
2013
“Like everyone, I know some big words, but I try my damndest not to use them.”
Henri Cole
2014
“In truth, I’m still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I’d rather say, I make poems.”
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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."
Lydia Davis
2015
“When I’m trying a new form— trying to do something I’m not used to doing, which was true of the novel.”
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.”
Elena Ferrante
2015
“As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.”
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."
Vivian Gornick
2014
“That’s the hardest thing to do—to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.”
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
“I think that when one is dead one should be a little bit bolder, so that the rest of us may have some record of how things actually were.”
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.”
Edward P. Jones
2013
“Until I can read a story physically, with the eyes, it doesn’t seem to exist for me.”
James Wood & Karl Ove Knausgaard
2014
“I think I’ve just substituted literature and art for religion.”
Imre Kertész
2013
“I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
2013
“One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.”
Hermione Lee
2013
“Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it’s a good death. Make sure you’re not picking someone who just declined.”
Mark Leyner
2013
“The book attained a mind of its own, a subjectivity or an autocatalytic machinelike quality.”
Hilary Mantel
2015
“I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.”
Jay McInerney
2016
It was a great time to be young and restless in New York. I wasn’t getting much writing done, but I like to think I witnessed a great moment and I internalized it.
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."
Herta Müller
2014
“Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?”
Eileen Myles
2015
“People loved to talk about how Frank O’Hara didn’t really care about getting published. That doesn’t jibe with my experience.”
Adam Phillips
2014
“I just want to see whether it’s possible to entertain Freud’s fantasy of a realistic biography. It may not be a possible thing to do.”
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.”
Luc Sante
2016
“Those who have earned respect should be given respect, regardless of their human faults.”
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.”
Jane Smiley
2015
“There weren’t too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.”
Dag Solstad
2016
Before you have the assumptions implicit in the first sentence, anything could happen. But once you have that sentence, you’ve narrowed your options down to a point where there really isn’t that much left to write.
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.”
David Szalay
2016
Chris Ware
2014
“I think cartooning gets at, and re-creates on the page, some sixth sense ... in a way no other medium can.”
Joy Williams
2014
“I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it.”
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