Sign in with Facebook
Writers at Work Quotes
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
by
Malcolm Cowley175 ratings, 4.26 average rating, 23 reviews
Writers at Work Quotes
Showing 1-5 of 5
“INTERVIEWER: So that you have not eliminated all didactic intentions from your work after all?
Thornton Wilder: I suspect that all writers have some didactic intention.
That starts the motor. Or let us say: many of the things we eat are cooked over a gas stove, but there is no taste of gas in the food.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
Thornton Wilder: I suspect that all writers have some didactic intention.
That starts the motor. Or let us say: many of the things we eat are cooked over a gas stove, but there is no taste of gas in the food.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
“INTERVIEWER: Can you say how you started as a writer?
FAULKNER: I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. ...
When I finished the book-it was Soldier's Pay-I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I'd finished it. She said, "Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn't have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it." I said, "Done," and that's how I became a writer.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
FAULKNER: I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. ...
When I finished the book-it was Soldier's Pay-I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I'd finished it. She said, "Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn't have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it." I said, "Done," and that's how I became a writer.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
“INTERVIEWER: Do you read your contemporaries?
FAULKNER: No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes-Don Quixote. I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac-he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books-Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally, and of the poets Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I've read these books so often that I don't always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you'd meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
FAULKNER: No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes-Don Quixote. I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac-he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books-Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally, and of the poets Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I've read these books so often that I don't always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you'd meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
“Thornton Wilder: The problem of telling you about my past life as a writer is like that of imaginative narration itself; it lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom. A great deal of writing and talking about the past is unacceptable. It freezes the historical in a determinism. Today’s
writer smugly passes his last judgment and confers on existing attitudes the lifeless aspect of plaster-cast statues in a museum.
He recounts the past as though the characters knew what was going to happen next.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
writer smugly passes his last judgment and confers on existing attitudes the lifeless aspect of plaster-cast statues in a museum.
He recounts the past as though the characters knew what was going to happen next.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
“The germ of a story is something seen or heard, or heard about, or suddenly remembered; it may be a remark casually dropped at the dinner table (as in the case of Henry James's story, The Spoils of Poynton ) , or again it may be the look on a stranger's face. Almost always it is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood; something that expresses the mood in one sharp detail; something that serves as a focal point for a hitherto disorganized mass of remembered material in the author's mind. James describes it as "the precious particle ... the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at a touch of which the novelist's imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point," and he adds that "its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible.”
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
― Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series
