What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

I am surprised that no novelist of today has yet devoted a work to the automobile, to the modern highway, to road side inns, to gallant adventures of the road such as Casanova celebrated in his Memories, which were full of post-chaises and hostelries familiar to travelers at the end of the Eighteenth century; or as George Borrow in The Bible in Spain wrote of adventures and encounters along the road in Spain at the beginning of the Twentieth century (a little in the manner ofL’Intineraire Espagnol of t’Sterstevens, except that Borrow hadn’t gone to Spain to write a book—that would never have occurred to him—but to distribute the book of books, the Bible, in Spain, and particularly to distribute it—queer idea!—to the gypsies). 

Gustave Lerouge, who died several years ago on the eve of the Second World War, was the author of 312 works (in any case, that is the number of his works in my library), many of which were in several volumes and one, Le Mysterieux Docteur Cornelius, was a 150-page masterpiece of scientific detective fiction in 56 installments; others were not even signed since Gustave Lerouge often worked for publishers of the seventeenth order. 

My father had a black Remington portable. He hit the keys so ardently that he wore their letters off. He ’d sit at that machine and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and make the most ferocious sound, not like a typewriter at all, more like a machine gun.

In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, there is a lot of talk about publishers; in France as a whole, much less. In Saint-Germain people like to speculate about whether the winner of the Prix Goncourt will be published by Gallimard or Julliard; in France people look for and buy novels which they think they will enjoy. The war of the literary prizes is of interest primarily to publishers, and it would be a mistake to think that it influences opinion or affects the history and the future of the French novel. Here, at any rate, are some of the prize-winners:—

Italo Calvino and I shared the same landscape: the Italian Riviera from Genoa to Menton, on the French border. We shared the rocks falling sheerly to the sea, hills covered with pine and olive trees, winter clumps

Long before the foundations of New Orleans were laid, the river existed as a legend and a rumor. It was the monster to the west, just beyond the next hill, stand of trees, prairie, horizon. It was the mother of all waters, the torrent that flowed out of the garden to touch the desolate earth. 

My chief occupation for the past six summers has been as a fire lookout in the Black Range District of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. For ten of every fourteen days I sit and watch for smoke from a mountain ten-thousand feet high. From my tower I can see at least fifty miles in each direction—on clear days nearly a hundred.

I’m only able to really get going once I stop trying to seek a way out.