It is great not required of the writer in these interviews that he be and wise. We all know, we readers of contemporary literature, that our novelists and poets do not live better than we do. What is required is that the writer be gifted, which ever since the Romantic period has meant vividness, a heightened degree of involvement with himself, a sense of his particular gift or daemon. When we interview a gifted, vivid, intense, highly charged modern writer, we are really saying: What does it feel like to be this gifted? What's it like, day after day, living with a gift like yours? [...]

The fascination of these contemporary interviews, for me, is that each brings vividly before us, as a person seemingly different, gifted with a more instinctive sense of freedom, a writer who can never be sure that his emotions, his habits, his childhood, his loves and enmities, are not crucial to his work. The modern writer is likely to feel that his life and his work speak for each other; when an interviewer gently presses him to tell more, he will gladly try, for in the writer's own mind clarity about a seemingly personal matter seems to advance that moral clarity which is tantamount to literary power. Power, technical and intellectual power, the power to shape words that open up new realities in the mind, is what writers live for. And since, in modern times, writers feel that this power is in themselves alone, one can see why the gifted writer is enthralled by his own experiences, is gripped by himself in ways that are of technical interest to the rest of us. There is always something professional and impersonal in a writer's concern with his own experience. Even his eloquence about it shows gratitude for what he can make of himself.