The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living? Nicholson Baker, “The Art of Fiction No. 212,” The Paris Review

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

My own first writing teacher used to tell her students that if there was anything else they could do with their lives instead of becoming writers, any other profession, they should do it.

Writers are always selling somebody out. [Writing] is an aggressive, even a hostile act . . . the tactic of a secret bully. Joan Didion.

If someone asks me what I teach, one of my colleagues says, why is it that I can never say “writing” without feeling embarrassed.

Not for nothing did Henry James say anyone who wants to be a writer must inscribe on his banner the one word loneliness.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

Why, of all the terrible memories of his ordeal as a POW in Japan during World War Two, was Olympic athlete and US Army airman Louis Zamperini most haunted by the memory of a guard torturing a duck?

It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about—also mostly college students—the internet barely exists.

You scoff, but you can’t deny that writing is an elitist, egotistic activity. You do it to get attention and to advance yourself in the world, you don’t do it to make the world a more just place. Of course there’s going to be some shame attached to it.”

What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.