0 notes &

At that moment, a certainty entered. I knew. He had attacked her here. The old ceremonial place had told me—cried out to me in my mother’s anguished voice, I now thought, and tears started into my eyes. I let them flood down my cheeks. Nobody was there to see me so I did not even wipe them away. I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

3 notes &

I never liked the idea [of ereaders] and most people don’t. They want to have pages. We’re like people who bought cars in the 1910s, and they would break down by the side of the road and people would yell, Get a horse! Now people yell, Get a book! It’s the same deal.

0 notes &

Interviewer:
How do you start writing every day?

Peter Carey:
It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you’re making up the earth you’re going to stand on.

2 notes &

Interviewer:
Why do you think people ask, Why don’t you write something that we can understand? Do you threaten them by not writing in the typical Western, linear, chronological way?

Toni Morrison:
I don’t think that they mean that. I think they mean, Are you ever going to write a book about white people? For them perhaps that’s a kind of compliment. They’re saying, You write well enough, I would even let you write about me. They couldn’t say that to anybody else. I mean, could I have gone up to Andre Gide and said, Yes, but when are you going to get serious and start writing about black people? I don’t think he would know how to answer that question. Just as I don’t. He would say, What? I will if I want to, or, Who are you? What is behind that question is, there’s the center, which is white, and then there are these regional blacks or Asians, or any sort of marginal people. That question can only be asked from the center. Bill Moyers asked me that when-are-you-going-to-write-about question on television. I just said, Well, maybe one day… but I couldn’t say to him, you know, you can only ask that question from the center. The center of the world! I mean he’s a white male. He’s asking a marginal person when are you going to get to the center, when are you going to write about white people. I can’t say, Bill, why are you asking me that question? Or, As long as that question seems reasonable is as long as I won’t, can’t. The point is that he’s patronizing; he’s saying, You write well enough; you could come on into the center if you wanted to. You don’t have to stay out there on the margins. And I’m saying, Yeah, well, I’m gonna stay out here on the margins, and let the center look for me.

3 notes &

What’s any artist but the dregs of his work?

7 notes &

I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, I don’t look like that. And Picasso replied, You will. And he was right.

2 notes &

Deep down I think foreign languages irrelevant. If that glass thing over there is a window, then it isn’t a fenster or a fenetre or whatever. Hautes fenetres, my God! A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.

0 notes &

There are different ways of doing things, and each one has a slightly different effect. A misunderstanding of this leads you to the Bill Gass position: that fiction can’t tell the truth, because every way you say the thing changes it. I don’t think that’s to the point. I think that what fiction does is sneak up on the truth by telling it six different ways and finally releasing it.