Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
From Joyce Carol Oates
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.
I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.
The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.
Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
6 perspectives
4 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives