Paris Review Interview Quotes

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

Ray Bradbury

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. [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

#8. 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

#9. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.

P.G. Wodehouse

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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