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
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?’”
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.”
Rebecca West
1981
“[The difference between women and men is the difference between] idiots and lunatics.”
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.’”
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.”
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 . . . ”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.’”
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.”
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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