Activity

INTERVIEWER: Are you waiting for the Messiah?

WIESEL: Not for a personal one. But I am waiting for something. It may be forever, but I would not want to stop waiting.

INTERVIEWER: Why?

WIESEL: Life would be empty. If everything were concentrated in the present, there would be no possibilit…

INTERVIEWER: Why not journalism?

WIESEL:It’s a different kind of recording. Journalism is too immediate, too monotonous and superficial. A chronicler is alone in his room and writes. A journalist is rarely alone. He writes about other people, and the essential is always missed. I was a journalis…

WIESEL: What is good for me is not necessarily good for someone else. Writing is so personal, so profoundly and terribly personal. Your entire personality goes into every word. The hesitation between one word and another is filled with many centuries, much space. And you deal with it one way, becau…

ozick: Ah! When I’ve taught those classes, I always say, “Forget about “Write about what you know.’ Write about what you don’t know.” The point is that the self is limiting. The self—subjectivity—is narrow and bound to be repetitive. We are,after all, a species. When you write about what you don’t …

OZICK: Quentin Bell’s biography told the story of his aunt, who happened to be the famous writer Virginia Woolf. But it was a family story really, about a woman with psychotic episodes, her husband’s coping with this, her sister’s distress. It had, as I said, the smell of a household. It was not ab…