A Writer Should Always Feel Like He's

There's The Fact That American Fiction Is Basically The Most Apolitical Fiction On The Globe. A South American Writer Wouldn't Dare Think Of Writing A Novel If It Didn't Allude To The System Into Which These People Are Orchestrated - Or An Eastern European Writer, Or A Russian Writer, Or A Chinese Writer. Only American Writers Are Able To Imagine That The Government And The Corporations - All Of It - Seem To Have No Effect Whatsoever.

Remember, How Often The Great Art Of The Past Didn't Look Great At First, How Often It Didn't Look Like Art At All; How Much Easier It Is, Decades Or Centuries Later, To Adore It, Not Only Because It Is, In Fact, Great But Because It's Still Here; Because The Inevitable Little Errors And Infelicities Tend To Recede In An Object That's Survived The War Of 1812, The Eruption Of Krakatoa, The Rise And Fall Of Nazism.

I Encourage The Translators Of My Books To Take As Much License As They Feel That They Need. This Is Not Quite The Heroic Gesture It Might Seem, Because I've Learned, From Working With Translators Over The Years, That The Original Novel Is, In A Way, A Translation Itself.

If She Were Religious, She Would Call It The Soul. It Is More Than The Sum Of Her Intellect And Her Emotions, More Than The Sum Of Her Experiences, Though It Runs Like Veins Of Brilliant Metal Through All Three. It Is An Inner Faculty That Recognizes The Animating Mysteries Of The World Because It Is Made Of The Same Substance

Like My Hero Virginia Woolf, I Do Lack Confidence. I Always Find That The Novel I'm Finishing, Even If It's Turned Out Fairly Well, Is Not The Novel I Had In My Mind. I Think A Lot Of Writers Must Negotiate This, And If They Don't Admit It, They're Not Being Honest.