The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.
It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.
The writer's is an interior world, a world of the mind.