The Paris Review

“As much as you can get serious and grief-stricken about what it’s like to be human, there’s something very light about how words just flip over and rhyme, and then kick you in the face.” —Alice Oswald

“I sent three stories to The New Yorker, and I got a letter from Roger. God, I wish I had it today. He said, ‘We’re not buying any of these, but I want to assure you that you have a future as a fiction writer.’” —Mary Robison

“It seemed to me that if I didn’t write, I would disappear.” —Frederick Seidel

“I felt that my life, my existence, was animated, or that the animation in me was animal. I experienced emotions that were like the emotions of hens or dogs.” —Hélène Cixous

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“To write with total devotion and with all the energy summoned up from the depth of one’s being, that is a very hard life.” —Ha Jin

“I can remember the feeling of fear of what would happen if I stopped rhyming—I had no idea what would stabilize the poem.” —Alice Oswald

“I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It’s not that you say, ‘I want to write a science fiction book.’ You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.” —Doris Lessing

“All writing that is strong, alive, is autobiographical. At the same time, everything is invented. Everything Proust wrote has passed through what reality whispered to him.” —Hélène Cixous

“I’m dedicated to the factual, and yet one has to have a tremendous capacity for factual and counterfactual thinking to be able to see any truth at all.” —Elaine Scarry

“All I need to write is to run in the morning, to have coffee and a Coke at hand, and to be able to take a nap. The siesta is crucial.” —Javier Cercas buff.ly/vgUcxHl

“Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.” —Jack Kerouac

“I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote ‘Fahrenheit 451’ I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.” —Ray Bradbury buff.ly/i484iPP

“I’ve absorbed so much poetry over the years, that there are just hundreds and hundreds of lines in my mind. And when one of them floats up out of the mass, I know it’s telling me something.” —Helen Vendler

“Our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts.” —Stephen King

“I have a few vices, but one of them is moderation.” —E. L. Doctorow buff.ly/Zlnp2pN

“Nothing else goes as far into the mastery and beauty of language as one can in French.” —Marie NDiaye

“The history of literature is ­accounts of consciousness that wouldn’t hold up in a court of law but do hold up on the page and in our hearts and minds.” —Hilton Als

“I don’t think poems have to have easy translation. I believe strongly in emotional and psychological narratives.” —Carl Phillips

“I was not interested in creating that rhythm of tension and release in order to arouse. That’s what pornography does.” —Robert Glück

“When it’s good it’s like a dream, I’m just working, and I’m not conscious of myself at all as a writer.” —Paula Fox

“Even a musician with the most modest career in some local bar is to me more glamorous than the most glamorous writer.” —Mary Gaitskill buff.ly/kbV6bgI

“When someone said, This isn’t good, I would say, Well, I actually think it’s brilliant, and the brilliance will be revealed when you’re ready.” —Lynn Nottage

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The Life and Times of the Literary Agent Georges Borchardt by Michael Meyer May 23, 2018 –   There’s a good chance Georges Borchardt was responsible for shepherding at least one of your favorite writers to publication. After immigrating to

The Paris Review mourns the loss of Georges Borchardt. Read our interview with him, published in 2018, here.

“I remember walking into the museum lobby and seeing that Frank had a big yellow pad and was writing in this gigantic hand a poem called ‘It’s the Blue.’” —James Schuyler

“Any book that you pick up as a reader is a printed circuit for your own life to flow through.” —E. L. Doctorow

“In my writing, I want to display a self that disintegrates. I can prop that up with theory, but something must compel me in the first place.” —Robert Glück buff.ly/hw5gXxh

“You build a novel. You have to build it like a building so that it stays standing when you’re not in it.” —Rachel Cusk

“Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave.” —E. B. White