Status Updates From The Paris Review Interviews, I

It is going to take me so long to work my way through this book. It's an absolute goldmine of interviews, with everyone from Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemmingway, to TS Eliot, and authors I would probably only encounter on a BA syllabus. All of them earnestly talking about their craft, and referencing their contemporaries (the ones still household names, and those who have fallen from the collective memory).

Joan Didion: Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.

Richard Price: The first book is always the most fun, because when you write your first book you’re just a writer. Then you get published. Then you become an author, and once you’re an author the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.