Interview of Jorge Luis Borges pays for the entire book | The Paris Review Interviews, I (Paris Review...

Better than a textbook. | The Paris Review Interviews, I (Paris Review Interviews) | The Paris Review

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	• The Paris Review Interviews, I (Paris Review Interviews) The Paris Review Picador, 2006 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

understanding the writing and behind, the thinking

5 stars for that incredible initiative of showing the way writers are writing, and behind this, thinking the stories, the personnages...
i have to say, that is a source of inspiration and of understanding of your own style/way of writing
something to really have on your shelves !!!

Interview of Jorge Luis Borges pays for the entire book

The flow of that Borges interview is already fascinating. It seems done really in one sitting... honest, and unedited--
-unlike the most of the others, where, in the introduction, it is admitted that the interviewee had done so much in the final draft that they become one more interviewer... interviewing themselves. (in any case, thats why many writers are willing to sit down for a Paris Review interview... because they are promised to have the final control on the output, if they so wish. even deadlines are disregarded if needed).

Then next best is Hemingway's. Bristling machismo in some of the answers. You see irritation, willingness to participate, then irritation again.

Then Billy Wilder's. It's amazing to discover that while he has been retired for so long when interviewed, he still has the wit and can recall personal events like it's yesterday. Im wondering now why he hadnt made anything for decades, but was still very involved in Holywood. (I gather from the interview that he still has an office he gets to everyday until he died).

The rest are of equal good quality. While not remarkable in total, there is always a question that is answered uniquely and interestingly by the subject writer. I have to admit though that Im not familiar with a number of them, and I still have 7 more to read though as of this writing.

Yes, the interviews are available online, but for 10 USD, you also get a good quality paper (used in the book), designed to last long. Nothing beats reading, leafing through the pages, and smelling a brilliant book. :-)

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Better than a textbook.

I've learned more about writing from this collection than I have from twenty textbooks on writing. A must-read for anyone interested in learning more about the craft of literature, whether as a writer or a reader.

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understanding the writing and behind, the thinking

The introduction is by Orhan Pamuk. Faulkner said an artist is a creature driven by demons. Graham Greene did not believe that any books he had read as an adult influenced him as a writer. James Thurber got his habits of memory, (nearly perfect recollection), from his mother. Thurber believed that Harold Ross had had a bloodhound instinct as an editor.

American writers felt their creativity and inventiveness would end in their fifties. Faulkner felt a writer's responsibility was to do his art. The writer should be ruthless. A writer always has to compromise when writing for the movies Faulkner believed.

Robert Lowell felt that teaching meant a lot to him as a human being. A person can't write poetry all the time. Writing comes from a deep impulse, deep inspiration. It isn't a craft. While he was writing LIFE STUDIES Lowell figured out it was a regular beat that he disliked. Lowell thought of Frost and Eliot as New England poets. In both Chekhov and Frost the art was found in the well-chosen plots.

To Eudora Welty, Jane Austen was a kindred spirit. She felt even closer to Chekhov for reason of his appreciation of the individual. She lost sleep over reading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. Katherine Anne Porter was wonderfully generous to her in the beginning.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez believes that journalism and fiction writing are matters of cross-fertilization. He never gets involved with a book unless someone recommends it. Philip Larkin refused almost all invitations to be a bigwig. He claimed that in writing a poem he constructed a verbal device. Larkin said he dealt with the passage of time by making every day the same. When young he exchanged unpublished poems with Kingsley Amis.

James Baldwin did not so much choose France as carry out the need to leave America. The painter Beauford Delaney taught Baldwin how to see. Baldwin believed that he had to go through a time of isolation. He wrote four novels before he published one.

William Gaddis had a reputation as a recluse. He thought he learned economy from Evelyn Waugh and that this is apparent in his novel, JR. Alice Munro lives in Clinton, Ontario. Her family lived in a collapsing enterprise, a fox and mink farm. Alice Munro and her second husband stayed in Ontario to be near older family members. When they passed on, Munro and her husband remained.

Information about the contributors appears at the end of this excellent book.

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A Picador Paperback Original
How do great writers do it? From James M. Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book--"I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm"--The Paris Review has elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. For more than half a century, the magazine has spoken with most of our leading novelists, poets, and playwrights, and the interviews themselves have come to be recognized as classic works of literature, an essential and definitive record of the writing life. They have won the coveted George Polk Award and have been a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Now, Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch introduces an entirely original selection of sixteen of the most celebrated interviews. Often startling, always engaging, these encounters contain an immense scope of intelligence, personality, experience, and wit from the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Rebecca West, and Billy Wilder. This is an indispensable book for all writers and readers.

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