There's not that many people from the sixties who have progressed as writers and are continuing on. They're out there. But I'm one of them who's just continued on, following his own little inner madness.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There are definitely people who are stuck in the '60s and there are definitely people who think I am and it's just not true. I was performing for a long time before the '60s and I'll be doing exciting interesting things for along time to come.
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.
Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.
What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.
I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.
Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease.
Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.