Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed. Malcolm Cowley.

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
Ed. Malcolm Cowley
New York: The viking Press, Inc.
1965 (1957)

Why read it? What can ordinary writers learn from the comments by writers on their writing? The book begins with six and one-half pages of questions the interviewers asked the writers whom they interviewed. The list of questions is of value in itself for future interviewers of writers. [I'm still waiting for someone to write articles or books on interviews with writers of professional journals (how do you collaborate on journal articles?), science books and journals, lawyers, etc. who also write professionally. RayS.]

Some sample ideas from these interviews:
Malcolm Cowley, editor of the book: "There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story...the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision...."

EM Forster: "Begin with the major event. The act of writing inspires ideas."

F. Mauriac: 1. "The novel has lost its purpose." 2. "For me as a novelist, man creates himself or destroys himself; not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mold once and for all." 3. "Success in literature is when the author disappears and the work remains."

Joyce Carey: 1. "A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments." 2. "Man is a free, creative spirit that produces the queer world we live in." 3. "You try to convey the fact plus the feeling." 4. "Real people are too complex and too disorganized for books." 5. "You've got to find out what people believe, what is pushing them on." 6. "I write the big scenes first, the scenes that carry the emotional experience. When I have the big scenes sketched I have to devise a plot into which they'll fit."

James Thurber: "Rewriting is a constant attempt on my part to make the finished version smooth, to make it seem effortless." Thurber quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald to Thomas Wolfe: "You're a putter-inner and I'm a taker-outer."

Thornton Wilder: "There are passages in every novel whose first writing is pretty much the last. It's the joint and cement, between those spontaneous passages, that take a great deal of rewriting."

William Faulkner: 1. "Art has no concern with peace and contentment." 2. "Movies are collaborations and collaboration is compromise; that is why movies are not usually art." 3. "The books I read now are the books I read when I was a young man. Don't always read the whole book, but familiar scenes." 4. "The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."

Simenon: 1. "Readers want a novel to probe their own troubles. 2. "Every evening I did some writing without any idea that [it] would ever be published."

Quote. Robert Penn Warren: "Man is interesting in his differences."

Quote. Simenon: "The tragedy of human life is that millions of people exist, but no two of them can communicate completely."