The Paris Review

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction No. 120 Quoting Neruda: “I have a chest full of all the insults, villainies, and infamies a man is capable of withstanding. . . . If you become famous, you will have to go through that.”

“It’s the most exciting moment when you discover life in what you’ve created.” —Mario Vargas Llosa

Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry No. 75 On poetry’s power to suspend violence: “It can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.”

“What matters is the shape-making impulse.” —Seamus Heaney

Elias Khoury, The Art of Fiction No. 233 “What’s a revolution? It’s when a regime can no longer control the populace, when the regime is brought down to the ground.”

“Repetition is, I might say, a way of insisting that every story contains many stories inside it.” —Elias Khoury

Nathaniel Mackey, The Art of Poetry No. 107 “By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter.”

“I think of it as an invitation. It sets up a question for the readers. Am I a part of this ‘we’?” —Nathaniel Mackey

Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Art of Fiction No. 159 “There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.”

“My job is not to give answers or to find solutions, but to ask questions, to testify in a human situation.” —Tahar Ben Jelloun

James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 “After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So—Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.”

“If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.” —James Baldwin

Elias Khoury, The Art of Fiction No. 233 “What’s a revolution? It’s when a regime can no longer control the populace, when the regime is brought down to the ground.”

“Repetition is, I might say, a way of insisting that every story contains many stories inside it.” —Elias Khoury

Nathaniel Mackey, The Art of Poetry No. 107 “By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter.”

“I think of it as an invitation. It sets up a question for the readers. Am I a part of this ‘we’?” —Nathaniel Mackey

Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Art of Fiction No. 159 “There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.”

“My job is not to give answers or to find solutions, but to ask questions, to testify in a human situation.” —Tahar Ben Jelloun

Henri Cole, The Art of Poetry No. 98 “In truth, I’m still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I’d rather say, I make poems.”

“I don’t know why I write when I do or why I’m silent.” —Henri Cole

Grace Paley, The Art of Fiction No. 131 “One of the first things I tell my classes is, If you want to write, keep a low overhead.”

“There’s always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something … ” —Grace Paley

Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250 “I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit.”

“I learned a lot from reading Beckett, naturally, and Thomas Bernhard—that peculiar tension between misanthropy and compassion that always lands in the right place. I like sentences that express more than one thing.” —Gary Indiana

Arundhati Roy, The Art of Fiction No. 249 “I love immersing myself in the universe of a novel for years. There is never a time when I am more alive.”

“My writing has created my community for me . . . it has become my passport to places that are otherwise not always welcoming to other people.” —Arundhati Roy

Gordon Lish, The Art of Editing No. 2 “I’ve got the fucking gift for it. Instinct, call it.”

“Carver could not have been more enthusiastic, nor more complicit—or complacent.” —Gordon Lish

Jeanette Winterson, The Art of Fiction No. 150 “I can't find a model, a female literary model who did the work she wanted to do and led an ordinary heterosexual life and had children. Where is she?”

“There’s no book; there are no rules. You must find it for yourself. But I hope it will be invigorating, and I hope it will be empowering.” —Jeanette Winterson

Ishmael Reed, The Art of Poetry No. 100 “I worked at a library and that’s where I first read James Baldwin. I think it was Notes of a Native Son. It stopped me cold.”

“I read Dante and realized how much power a writer could have. A writer could put people in hell who weren’t even dead yet.” —Ishmael Reed

John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3 “With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes…

“Structure is not a template. It’s not a cookie cutter.” —John McPhee

Pat Barker, The Art of Fiction No. 243 “Books stand or fall really on their endings. I don't think there's any such thing as a good novel that has a weak ending.”

“One of the most powerful ways of seeing each particular character clearly is to look at them suddenly from a different position, from the point of view of another character.” —Pat Barker

Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223 “I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it.”

“Look what we did to the Earth when it was green and provident. We’ll suck it to the bone with limitation’s necessities.” —Joy Williams

Dennis Cooper, The Art of Fiction No. 213 “I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I’ve studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it.”

“I realize it’s very difficult to get people not to think of characters in novels as their text-based friends, but a lot of misunderstanding is eliminated if they don’t.” —Dennis Cooper

Ha Jin, The Art of Fiction No. 202 “English has more flexibility. It’s a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.”

“To be a literary writer does not mean just to write books—you need to look for some space in a language and find your niche in it.” —Ha Jin

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Art of Translation No. 4 “The good effect of translating is this cross-pollination of languages.”

“Smooth translations slide smoothly into oblivion.” —Richard Pevear

Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing No. 2 “[The idea of] ‘free love’ . . . was implicit in communism, because Lenin said ‘Sex should be like having a glass of water.’”

“Fred Jordan and I flew to the mountains of Bolivia in search of Che’s diaries after he was assassinated. Everyone was trying to get that diary, including the CIA.” —Barney Rosset
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Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71 “Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. . . . Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.”

“On the whole, I don’t want to think too much about why I write what I write.” —Joan Didion

Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102 “[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling—is like an encounter group . . . ”

“So much is destroyed, we can’t be bothered.” —Doris Lessing

Edward Hirsch, The Art of Poetry No. 110 “It’s part of your job, as a poet, to write out of experience. To name what matters to you. You’ve only got one life to draw on.”

“For a long time—I’d say all of my twenties and much of my thirties—I was simply reading everything I could and trying to assimilate it.” —Edward Hirsch

Nathalie Sarraute, The Art of Fiction No. 115 “I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.”

“The idea of ‘women’s writing’ shocks me. I think that in art we are androgynous.” —Nathalie Sarraute

Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198 “I write novels quickly, which is not my reputation.”

“Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that!” —Marilynne Robinson

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction No. 120 Quoting Neruda: “I have a chest full of all the insults, villainies, and infamies a man is capable of withstanding. . . . If you become famous, you will have to go through that.”

“In the beginning there’s something very nebulous, a state of alert, a wariness, a curiosity.” —Mario Vargas Llosa

Ralph Ellison, The Art of Fiction No. 8 “The American novel is … a conquest of the frontier; as it describes our experience, it creates it.”

“The nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are.” —Ralph Ellison