Activity

DOCTOROW: A writer’s life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure’s bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen.

INTERVIEWER: Except the act of writing itself.

DOCTOROW: Except the act …

[...] I subscribe to what Henry James tries to indicate when he gives that wonderful example of a young woman who has led a sheltered life walking along beside an army barracks and hearing a snatch of soldier’s conversation coming through the window. On the basis of that, said James, if she’s a nov…

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea how a project is going to end?

DOCTOROW:Not at that point, no. It’s not a terribly rational way to work.It’s hard to explain. I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your…

WALCOTT: There is a duty in every son to become his own man. The son severs himself from the father. The Caribbean very often refuses to cut that umbilical cord to confront its own stature. So a lot of people exploit an idea of Africa out of both the wrong kind of pride and the wrong kind of heroic…

WALCOTT: [...] Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean,it’s like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself b…