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unearths some literary gems.
From the Writers at Work (Paris Review Interviews) series:
***[E. M. Forster talks about basing characters on real people.]"The three Miss Dickinsons condensed into two Miss Schlegels...."[...]INTERVIEWER:Can you say anything about the process of turning a real person into a fictional one?FORSTER:A useful trick is to look back upon such a person with half-closed eyes, fully describing certain characteristics. I am left with about two-thirds of a human being and can get to work.[...]To ask one and one-half Miss Dickinsons how Helen should comport herself...would have ruined the atmosphere and the book.***[Yonkers dept.]"You can't get it except as the culmination of two hours of development. You can't get it by raising your voice and yelling, suddenly--because it's getting time to get on the train for Yonkers." [Arthur Miller][P.S. A day or two later, "Yonkers" showed up in a crossword puzzle I was doing.]***[Plural "Bloomsburies"! (I.e., members of the Bloomsbury circle.)]"I met...all the Bloomsburies." [Aldous Huxley]***[The quips write themselves on this item.]"My wife typed out the manuscript of Lady Chatterley's Lover for [Lawrence], even though she was a bad typist and had no patience with English spelling." [Huxley]***"[A generation of young writers] were not interesting in poems. They were interested in doing their thing. They did--and that was that." [Archibald MacLeish]***"The French appreciated it as I meant it to be: a combination fairy tale and joke." [Irwin Shaw]***INTERVIEWER: This book also contains another of your favorite characters, doesn't it?KINGSLEY AMIS: Oh yes, George Parrott.***[James Dickey refers to an (unfinished) "lifelong work" by another writer called Death's Jest Book.]***"I must limit [the protagonist of Something Happened] because if he had all my attributes he wouldn't be working for that company, he'd be writing Catch-22." [Joseph Heller]***"I was skating on one galosh." [William Gass]***"Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off." [Gass]***"The only thing [her fictional protagonist] Maria and I have in common is an occasional inflection, which I picked up from her--not vice versa--when I was writing the book." [Joan Didion]***[Leonora Carrington vis-a-vis Mountains dept.]"Emeralds--when you look at them closely--are always disappointing. The green is never blue enough. Ideally, if the green were blue enough you could look into an emerald for the rest of your life." [Didion]***[A sort of meta "Someone Should..." item?]"I keep on thinking of fascinating ideas for books. I ought to think them up for other people to write rather than me." [Stephen Spender]***"A man [at a reading] asked, 'How many movies have been made of your poems?'" [Spender]***"If the poem is to go anywhere it has somehow to develop a subject fairly quickly, even if that subject is a blank shape." [James Merrill]***[Re. feedback from first readers]"So-and-so thinks a passage is obscure? Good--it stays obscure: that'll teach him!" [Merrill]***[On the coining of the "lost generation."]MALCOLM COWLEY: The [garage] proprietor said to Miss Stein, "These young men are no good--they are all a lost generation." Une génération perdue....INTERVIEWER: Is it possible the garageman was referring to "a lost generator"?***"Some of the characters were derived from people living on the farm at the time, so it was a handy place to be. I would come for lunch and they would make remarks I had put in their mouths that morning." [William Maxwell]***INTERVIWER: Do you have an imagined audience?MAY SARTON: It's really one imaginary person.INTERVIWER: Would you talk a little about this imaginary person?SARTON: Well, I don't mean that when I sit down I think, "Oh, there is that imaginary person over there I'm writing for"....***"Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can." [Ionesco]***"You have to wade through some three hundred pages in order to find out who Lady So-and-so's lover was, and then at the end you may guess that it was So-and-so and not What's-his-name." [Borges; and attached is a longer Borges snippet]***"I remember Stravinsky, so tiny, looking up at this enormous giant Sequoia and standing there for a long time in meditation and then turning to me and saying, 'That's serious.'" [Christopher Isherwood]***"I've written lots of stuff that I hate, but there it is, flapping around in the vaults of various motion-picture studios." [Isherwood]***"The notes in music do not denote anything." [Auden; he's simply saying they're not symbols, unlike words, but I like the apparent paradox of note/denote.]***"How marvelous that the essential bifurcation which is man is expressed in trousers that carry Lévi-Strauss's name." [Anthony Burgess, who sees Structuralism as a theoretical bifurcation, and is thus doing an expert-level version of the hackneyed joke whereby the two Levi Strausses are conflated.[Burgess also talks about the "punning chord," which was new to me.]***"I wrote to Shaw who immediately received me and gave me a discourse on how good James's plays would have been if he had written them like Shaw plays." [Leon Edel]***"[Lionel Trilling] returned the paper with a wounding reprimand: 'Never, never begin an essay with a parenthesis in the first sentence.' Ever since then, I've made a point of starting out with a parenthesis in the first sentence." [Cynthia Ozick][Ozick also, apparently, has an idea that writers live in a world of "as if."]***"It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market." [Anita Brookner]***[On the topic of how important it is or is not for a writer to live in New York]"Personal contacts, acquaintances, visibility, all have practical usefulness. But they are not now as absolutely essential as they were then. The principal danger is that, like a character in a radio play who says nothing for a minute or two, you may disappear." [Wallace Stegner]***On Thursday afternoons--when I was on my day off from the Albany Times-Union and waiting for the muse to descend and discovering that it was the muse's day off too....[William Kennedy]***Damon Runyan's style...just leaped out at you and said, "Look at me! I'm a style!" [Kennedy]
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