Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.
Travelling is difficult, and writers tend to want to stay at home and do their work.
It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear.
I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.
A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.