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INTERVIEWER
I remember that you once warned me to avoid [a newspaper job] at all costs—to get a job “hashing” in a restaurant in preference.
PORTER
Anything, anything at all. I did it for a year and that is what confirmed for me that it wasn’t doing me any good. After that I always took little dull jobs that didn’t take my mind and wouldn’t take all of my time, and that, on the other hand, paid me just enough to subsist. I think I’ve only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water . . . Even Saint Teresa said, “I can pray better when I’m comfortable,” and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don’t think living in cellars and starving is any better for an artist than it is for anybody else; the only thing is that sometimes the artist has to take it, because it is the only possible way of salvation, if you’ll forgive that old-fashioned word.
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 Download a PDF of the full interview |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| E. M. Forster, Mary McCarthy, William Styron, Jane Austen, Emily Brontė, Dante, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, Homer, Richard Hughes, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, Montaigne, Petrarch, Pierre de Ronsard, William Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Ivan Turgenev, Voltaire, Virginia Woolf |
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