Currently working my way through the Paris Review Interviews volumes 1-4; this thing is a goldmine. It’s an MFA program in a box! Choice quotes:
“There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.” –Dorothy Parker
“Too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well, in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.” –Truman Capote
“I seem to remember reading that Dickens, as he wrote, choked with laughter over his own humor and dripped tears all over the page when one of his characters died. My own theory is that the writer should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke similar reactions in a reader.” –Truman Capote
Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” –Ernest Hemingway
“I wanted to learn the technique of the theater so well that I could then forget about it. I always feel it’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.” –T.S. Eliot
“But let us look at one of the dominant ideas of the century, accepted by many modern artists–the idea that humankind has reached a terminal point. We find this terminal assumption in writers like Joyce, Celine, Thomas Mann. In Doktor Faustus politics and art are joined in the destruction of civilization. Now here is an idea, found in some of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. How good is this idea? Frightful things have happened, but is the apocalyptic interpretation true? The terminations did not fully terminate. Civilization is still here. The prophecies have not been borne out. Novelists are wrong to put an interpretation of history at the base of artistic creation–to speak “the last word.” It is better that the novelist should trust his own sense of life. Less ambitious. More likely to tell the truth.” –Saul Bellow
“When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential. If you invent metaphors, they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of the second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever.” –Jorge Luis Borges
“Everness, of course, is better than eternity because eternity is rather worn now. Ever-r-ness is far better than the German Ewigkeit, the same word. But [Bishop Wilkins] also created a beautiful word, a word that’s a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and despair–the word neverness. A beautiful word, no? He invented it, and I don’t know why the poets left it lying about and never used it.” –Jorge Luis Borges
“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” –Kurt Vonnegut
“If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.” –Kurt Vonnegut
“Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. Modern life is so lonely, they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so that the characters will say surprising or revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade.” –Kurt Vonnegut
“When you’re young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can’t be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative-writing courses! The academics don’t know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.” –James M. Cain
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever go and see the film [of your book]? What did you think of it?
JAMES M. CAIN: I don’t go. There are some foods some people just don’t like. I just don’t like movies. People tell me, Don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf. They paid me and that’s the end of it.
“Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational.” –James M. Cain
INTERVIEWER: Have you never had a close relationship with an editor, who has helped you after the books were written?
REBECCA WEST: No. I never met anybody with whom I could have discussed books before or after. One doesn’t have people on one’s wavelength as completely as that. And I rarely found The New Yorker editors any good.
INTERVIEWER: They have a tremendous reputation.
WEST: I don’t know why.
“I do think modern novels are boring on the whole. Somebody told me I ought to read a wonderful thing about how a family of children buried Mum in a cellar under concrete and she began to smell. But that’s the whole point of the story. Mum just smells. That’s all that happens. It is not enough.” –Rebecca West
“On the newspaper board they used to sit around and talk about how they could get published and so on and so on. I’d just hold my tongue. I was embarrassed by it. And still am. There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet, really.” –Elizabeth Bishop
“I began A Hall of Mirrors as a realistic novel, but my life changed and the world changed and when I thought about it I realized that “realism” was a fallacy. It’s simply not tenable. You have to write a poem about what you’re describing. You can’t render, can’t dissect. Zola was deluded.” –Robert Stone
“When I teach writing, I do things like take classes to bars and race tracks to listen to dialogue. But that kind of thing has limited usefulness. There’s no body of technology to impart. But that doesn’t mean classes can’t help. The idea that young writers ought to be out slinging hash or covering the fights or whatever is bullshit.” –Robert Stone
“In my experience of writing, you generally start out with some overall idea that you can see fairly clearly, as if you were standing on a dock and looking at a ship on the ocean. At first you can see the entire ship, but then as you begin work you’re in the boiler room and you can’t see the ship anymore. All you can see are the pipes and the grease and the fittings of the boiler room and, you have to assume, the ship’s exterior. What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.” –Michael Crichton
“There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren’t writers. I can write perfectly well–anybody who’s educated can write perfectly well. But I dislike writing: it’s very, very hard, and I just don’t like the activity. Whereas reading is like breathing.” –Robert Gottlieb
“The first book is always the most fun, because when you write your first book you’re just a writer. Then you get published. Then you become an author, and once you’re an author the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.” –Richard Price
“I was also puzzled by the fact that so many of the established poets didn’t like each other. There’s competition, naturally–and naturally you relate to someone who can promote you. That’s not awful; that’s the way the world works. It’s just not the way I work. But don’t get me wrong, what they’re doing–these meetings where they give each other prizes–I think it’s wonderful.” –Jack Gilbert
“Why do so many poets settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not greedy for what’s inside them. The heart has the ability to experience so much–and we don’t have much time.” –Jack Gilbert
“I was never a big fan of people who didn’t leave home. I don’t know why. It just seems part of your duty in life.” –Joan Didion
