writer
It is much better for a writer to be underrecognized than over, in terms of keeping one’s head down, like the proverbial Japanese nail, so that one might observe the world unhammered and unimpeded. Abjure fame and avoid obscurity. But between those extremes lies the perch where a writer occasionally might do some good work. There’s a Jack Butler Yeats painting I love, showing a wild celebration of St. John’s Eve in western Ireland, with Yeats and J. M. Synge standing in the background, watching and looking small and out of the picture. Yet it was they who created the picture, and a good deal more.
“Please Turn to the Chapter on Obscurity . . .,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2014.
Most writer interviews are not art at all, but a sort of cultural packaging. The cages are too small, the questioner’s powers too sweeping; what we want to know obliterates what the speaker wants to say.
“The Interview as Art,” in The Good Word and Other Words (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 211.
He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater’s famous phrase, he burned “with this hard gem-like flame.” Right to the end.
“Christopher Hitchens: ‘the consummate writer, the brilliant friend,'” Guardian, December 16, 2011.
Were all these writers and artists more fragile than ordinary human beings or do we just know their names? It does seem as if there is a peril association with gift, a proclivity to break your brain just as professional skiers may be apt to break their legs as they swoop downward through wind and snow. It may be that to see and tell the story of human error is to dare to expose yourself to the sacred flash of truth that can drive you mad. Or are you mad to try in the first place?
Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2011), 182–83.
I always think that everybody is getting their ideas in the shower and the people who are writing them down, keeping the soggy notes, are the writers.
“Scott Spencer,” interviewed by Lorrie Moore, BOMB magazine, Issue 67, Spring 1999.
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
Charlotte’s Web (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), full color edition, 184.
Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 33.