GRACE PALEY
1992
On being criticized for narrating a black person’s point of view: “The whole point [of writing] is to put yourself into other lives, other heads . . . If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that's all.” |
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ORHAN PAMUK
2005
“I am notorious for my political comments—most of which are picked up from international interviews and shamelessly manipulated by some Turkish nationalist journalists to make me look more radical and politically foolish than I really am.” |
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DOROTHY PARKER
1956
“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.' ” |
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BORIS PASTERNAK
1960
“[With Dr. Zhivago] it seemed to me that it was my duty to make a statement about our epoch. . . . I wanted to record the past and to honor . . . the beautiful and sensitive aspects of the Russia of those years.” |
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OCTAVIO PAZ
1991
“If a society without social justice is not a good society, a society without poetry is a society without dreams, without words . . . and without that bridge between one person and another that poetry is. If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.” |
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WALKER PERCY
1987
“I reincarnated [Thomas Moore] again in my new novel and I'm sorry to say he has fallen upon hard times; he is a far cry from the saint, drinks too much, and watches reruns of M*A*S*H on TV.” |
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S. J. PERELMAN
1963
“Writers who pontificate about their own use of language drive me right up the wall. . . . In what spare time I have, I read the expert opinions of V. S. Pritchett and Edmund Wilson, who are to my mind the best-qualified authorities on the written English language.” |
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ROBERT PINSKY
1997
“Advice and instruction have always fascinated me, partly because of their pathos—so little is transmitted in any given instance of advice or pedagogy.” |
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HAROLD PINTER
1966
“The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flamethrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess this action from a political point of view.” |
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KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
1963
“Even Saint Teresa said, ‘I can pray better when I'm comfortable.’ . . . I don't think living in cellars and starving is any better for an artist than it is for anybody else . . . ” |
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EZRA POUND
1962
“. . . It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it.” |
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ANTHONY POWELL
1978
On seeing a sexually suggestive billboard: “ . . . I'm not sure that I really particularly want to see [the actor] having her. I think my own imagination would be better about that than him doing it.” |
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RICHARD POWERS
2003
On how music is an intimation of death: “You start the song
. . . and you know, even as you round the corner of the first verse, that it’s only going to last for four and a half minutes. All you can do is keep moving to it.” |
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REYNOLDS PRICE
1991
Imagining Emma Bovary in bed: “[She’d be] rather stunned and frantic, I would think. And I don't say it to be comic. I suspect stunned and frantic, breathless and shockingly cold to the touch.” |
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RICHARD PRICE
1996
On the dangers of researching his books in the field: “I could never be left alone. I had to run when they ran. It can be pretty scary to get lost in a building. You're with the cops. Everybody hates the cops.” |
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V. S. PRITCHETT
1990
“I was having tea with [Yeats] one day, and I remember he picked up a pot of tea and, finding that it was already full of old tea, he opened the window of his Georgian house and flung the contents into the square! Rhetoric poured out of him all the while.” |
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MANUEL PUIG
1989
“Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed. In Latin America there's the illusion that a writer can change something; of course, it's not that simple.” |
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JEAN RHYS
1979
“One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, ‘Damn it, I'll sit down. I can't go on’ . . . So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up. Oh yes, I used to try to imagine death, but I always come up against a wall.” |
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ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET
1986
On the difference between eroticism and poetry: “When the crudity of the sexual act goes through the imagination it becomes eroticism, and when it doesn't, it is pornography.” |
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NED ROREM
1999
“All art is a lie, insofar as truth is defined by the Supreme Court. After all, Picasso's goat isn't a goat. Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact?” |
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BARNEY ROSSET
1997
“[The idea of] ‘free love’ . . . was implicit in communism, because Lenin said ‘Sex should be like having a glass of water.’” |
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PHILIP ROTH
1984
“The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters into flesh and blood.” |
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
2005
“I thought it odd that storytelling and literature seemed to have come to a parting of the ways. . . . A story doesn’t have to be simple . . . but, especially if it’s multidimensional, you need to find the clearest, most engaging way of telling it.” |
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FRANCOISE SAGAN
1956
“I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.” |
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JAMES SALTER
1993
“The real event of the 1980s was . . . the emergence of great looting fortunes . . . which made us revise the value of everything—not to the benefit of society . . . ” |
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JOSE SARAMAGO
1998
“This is a blindness permits us . . . to send a craft to Mars to examine rock formations on that planet while at the same time allowing millions of human beings to starve on this planet. Either we are blind, or we are mad.” |
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NATHALIE SARRAUTE
1990
“I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.” |
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MAY SARTON
1983
“[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . . ” |
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GEORGE SEFERIS
1970
“In English the expression ‘ancient Greece’ includes the meaning of ‘finished,’ whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet.” |
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JORGE SEMPRUN
2007
“When I write, I make my memories tangible, and in this way I can get rid of them. On the other hand, writing is but a ploy to convulse memory back into life.” |
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MARY LEE SETTLE
1990
“[The inspiration that comes to authors of fiction] is not an act of intelligence.” |
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ANNE SEXTON
1971
“Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide . . . between the free potato chips . . . We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it.” |
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KARL SHAPIRO
1986
“I always had this feeling—I've heard other Jews say—that when you can't find any other explanation for Jews, you say, ‘Well, they are poets.’” |
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IRWIN SHAW
1979
“The most brilliant example [of good editing] in our time
. . . was Ezra Pound’s editing of The Waste Land, which made the poem infinitely better.” |
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IRWIN SHAW
1953
On the New York theater audience: “I have a fine play in mind I'll write for them someday. The curtain slides up on a stage bare except for a machine gun facing the audience. . . . [then] the actor walks upstage, adjusts the machine gun, and blasts them.” |
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SAM SHEPARD
1997
“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” |
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GEORGES SIMENON
1955
“The fact [is] that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people . . . ” |
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CHARLES SIMIC
2005
“A ‘truth’ detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.” |
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CLAUDE SIMON
1992
“In general, I distrust philosophy. Plato recommended chasing poets from the city; the ‘great’ Heidegger was a Nazi; Lukacs was a communist; and J. P. Sartre wrote: ‘Any anti-communist is a dog.’” |
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JOHN SIMON
1997
“I don't like uniforms. I don't like people abdicating their identity to become part of some group, and then becoming obsessed with this and making capital of it . . . ” |
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NEIL SIMON
1992
“[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you’re clearing a path and getting to the right place.” |
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ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
1968
“I wonder what these people thought thousands of years ago of these sparks they saw when they took off their woolen clothes?” |
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JOSEF SKVORECKY
1989
“When the Communist Party comes to power, it acts a lot like the mafia: If you are a loyal member in good standing, everything is yours. You're protected, even if you commit a crime.” |
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W. D. SNODGRASS
1994
“I've been accused of humanizing the Nazis, to which I can only say, you can't blame me for that. God did that. Go talk to him. It's a strange thing for an atheist to say.” |
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GARY SNYDER
1996
“Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step . . . is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world.” |
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STEPHEN SONDHEIM
1997
“[My fairy tale] is about moral responsibility—the responsibility you have in getting your wish not to cheat and step on other people's toes, because it rebounds.” |
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SUSAN SONTAG
1995
On Yeats’s assertion that one must choose between the life and the work: “Of course, if by life you mean life with other people, Yeats's dictum is true. Writing requires huge amounts of solitude.” |
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ELIZABETH SPENCER
1989
“[My father] had brought in some large pieces of petrified wood . . . He said, “I reckon those things have been there since the Flood.” That Flood, of course, covered the whole earth, involved Noah’s ark, and presumably left petrified wood outside of Carrollton, Mississippi!” |
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STEPHEN SPENDER
1980
“An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance . . . ” |
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WILLIAM STAFFORD
1993
“What you have to do as a writer is
. . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.” |
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WALLACE STEGNER
1990
On his family: “Instead of expecting to make a big strike somewhere, which is a very American notion . . . I would have liked to see a little more just plain stick-to-itiveness at times. The longest journey begins with a single step . . . ” |
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JOHN STEINBECK
1969
“Once in college I . . . got to going to the library and reading what I wanted instead of what was required. I got behind. . . . And I still have bad dreams about that. It must have cut a very deep channel.” |
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JOHN STEINBECK
1975
“Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn’t mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.” |
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GEORGE STEINER
1995
“Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.” |
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ROBERT STONE
1985
“God is this huge creature who we must know, love, and serve, though actually you feel like you want to kick the son of a bitch.” |
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TOM STOPPARD
1988
“On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.” |
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MARK STRAND
1998
“I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not . . . just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead.” |
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WILLIAM STYRON
1999
Describing a doctoral thesis on Sophie’s Choice: “There was a footnote, which I swear to you said, ‘Where the movie is obscure I will refer to William Styron's novel for clarification.’” |
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WILLIAM STYRON
1954
On when he writes: “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. . . . The afternoon is the only time I have left . . . ” |
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JAMES TATE
2006
“The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out. . . . I put down mountain, then I'd go, no—valley. That's better.” |
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PETER TAYLOR
1987
“I think trying to write is a religious exercise . . . When I create, when I put my own mark on something and form it, I begin to know the whole truth about it, how it was put together.” |
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HUNTER S. THOMPSON
2000
“Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?” |
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JAMES THURBER
1955
“When I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and . . . there she was stuck up there, naked, on a bookcase.” |
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CHARLES TOMLINSON
1998
“Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style . . . ” |
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P. L. TRAVERS
1982
On lending Mary Poppins to a friend who hated children’s books: “I got a letter back saying: ‘Why didn't you tell me? Mary Poppins with her cool green core of sex has me enthralled forever.’” |
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WILLIAM TREVOR
1989
“English eccentricity has a suburban quality—it's like a very neatly trimmed garden in which you suddenly realize that the flower beds aren't what they seem to be.” |
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CALVIN TRILLIN
1995
On first discovering his sense of humor: “I stood up with my right hand gradually becoming noticeably weird and said: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cleave to duh woof of my mout.’” |
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