Paris Review Quotes & Sayings

They got into fact checking at the 'Paris Review,' and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway's lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn't lose those stories. They weren't stolen from the platform. — Padgett Powell

You don't read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you'd be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were ... thieves. And aren't we all thieves? You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral. — Mark Strand

MERCER USED TO PASS THE TIME, during his post-grad months of flipping burgers out on Route 17, by polishing his opinions on life and literature for that future date when they would grace the pages of The Paris Review. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation
who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him
but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope
qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning. — Bill Styron

Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time. — Sloane Crosley

[The way I work] is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

(The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101) — E.L. Doctorow

I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage. — Thornton Wilder

The novella will be called, I think, "The Messiah of Stockholm." It takes place in Stockholm. I'd better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out. — Cynthia Ozick

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that. — Siri Hustvedt

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
[Interview, The Paris Review, Summer 1956] — Dorothy Parker

In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I've never forgotten: Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay. — Gretchen Rubin

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober. — Irwin Shaw

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself. — John Le Carre

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review. — William Kennedy

If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line.
[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989] — Max Frisch

Ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a fortune in ten years, but you're not going to be read in twenty years, and that's that. — John Gardner

thing, "Typhoon and the Tor Bay" it was called, — The Paris Review

I don't even know how people read new fiction anymore because there's so much old fiction that exists that seems great that's unread. It's overwhelming to me. But, I mean, I do read. But there probably haven't been many people less literate than me that have been in 'The Paris Review.' — Harmony Korine

In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He had a special soft way of going up to them, and he'd bring them back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off. — Lawrence Durrell

There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. — Ray Bradbury

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art. — William Trevor

The late Mavis Gallant told the Paris Review that writing is like "a love affair: the beginning is the best part. I write every day. It is not a burden. It is the way I live. — Mavis Gallant

'The Paris Review' was always the pinnacle: it was the place to be published. You were thrilled if you were published in 'The Paris Review,' and George Plimpton himself was practically mythical. He was a legendary figure. — James Salter

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now. — Rick Moody

Stories are the only things that give any meaning to our pointless, shapeless lives."
"Literature above all is a mode of transport. It lifts you up out of whatever situation you're in and it puts you down somewhere else. It fucking escapes you. That's what literature is."
-Jumping Off a Cliff: An Interview with Kevin Barry, the Paris Review. November 2013 — Kevin Barry

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world. — Haruki Murakami

Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't.
(William Faulkner) — William Faulkner

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
(Interview with Paris Review, 1958) — Ernest Hemingway,

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with. — William Trevor

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That's why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

New York just expects so much from a girl - acts like it can't stand even the idea of a wasted talent or opportunity ... Rome says: enjoy me. London: survive me. New York: gimme all you got. What a thrilling proposition! The chance to be "all that you might be." Such a thrill - until it becomes a burden. — Zadie Smith

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988) — John Irving

I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times. — Bill Styron

I'm a California boy. I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
(Paris Review Interview) — Ray Bradbury

I always dream of some great unexpected infidelity. But I have not yet been able to escape my bigamous state."
Milan Kundera, "The Paris Review" summer 1984 no. 92 — Milan Kundera

I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980. — Siri Hustvedt

It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes. — Dorothy Parker

... my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.) — Carlos Fuentes

I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing. — P.G. Wodehouse

The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer. — Hanya Yanagihara

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975) — P.G. Wodehouse

If someone asks me, "Why do you write?" I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, "Why do you write the way you do?" I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world - every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste. — William H Gass

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
(Interview, The Paris Review) — William S. Burroughs

This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the 'Paris Review' and places. They're all acting. It's like watching a person in a play. — John Jeremiah Sullivan