Paris Review Quotes

#1. [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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.

Siri Hustvedt

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. '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

#9. 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

#10. [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

#11. 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

#12. ... 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

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

Ray Bradbury

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

P.G. Wodehouse

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.

Dorothy Parker

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

John Le Carre

#32. 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

#33. thing, "Typhoon and the Tor Bay" it was called,

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