If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?
From my point of view, why shouldn't I work in every possible mode, to see if it's viable? "Los Gigantes" would not have worked as a straightforward, naturalistic tale. Part of the fun of it is that it's so preposterous and yet at the same time, it could have happened. Think of eugenics. Hitler certainly would have been doing it if he could have.
I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.
I think if you read all my books you know where I stand, pretty much. You could probably give the reader a questionnaire and they could figure out what I'm about. But I don't think my job is to tell you that.
There's a kind of mystery to our being and from my point of view, regarding my own parents and their parents, I'd as soon let it lie than find out who my mother's father was.
I have very rarely written autobiographical stuff. "Greasy Lake" and some other works have some autobiographical elements, as does "Birnam Wood," the one I chose to end [this collection] with. I lived in that house and some of my feelings are expressed in it, but it's not autobiography. It was not me and that didn't happen exactly that way.
I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.
All writers are egomaniacal, manic-depressive, drug-addicted alcoholics. You want to have that fix again.
I love satire. Evelyn Waugh is one of my favorite writers of all time. He's hilarious. He's so wicked. He's so great. On the other hand, pure satire is an imitation. It doesn't really have any heart. It only holds things up to ridicule.
One of the problems I have with many writers is their stories are all somewhat similar. They might be very good, but they're always on the same turf. I don't have those limitations.
Especially students. I love to turn them on to a story. Some of them have to go see me as an assignment, like kids from the schools in New York will go to the Y. I want them to know why I love this and why they should too.
A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.
I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?
The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome.
