I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really, viscerally, believe that everything matters, suffering is real, and death is imminent.

—George Saunders

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

In my own case, I certainly don’t walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door… I don’t burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.

You try to surprise yourself. You want to go against what you’ve done before. You want to burn up and destroy all your previous work; you want to reinvent yourself with every project. Once you fall into habits, I think, you’re dead as an artist.

… the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. You as a reader enter the consciousness of another person, and in doing so, I think you discover something about your humanity, and it makes you feel more alive.

—Paul Auster

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

People often expect—I don’t know why—that two writers living together must generate some hostility or friction. With us, it was the contrary; each understood what the other was up against; the need for seclusion, silence, and a need also for stimulus, sociability, sharing. Even the need for interruption, but only if one could dictate the interruption on one’s own capricious terms… Each of us understood that behind the closed door, on some particular day, the other might be going mad over a recalcitrant paragraph.

[I work purely from] Memory. I think I have a fairly remarkable memory. I’ve always reserved what gave me pleasure, what interested me. Aldo, what had been poignant: the nature of sadness, the private anguish of tragedy, regret. I am full of lines of poetry, impressions, experiences, words. If remembrance were all pleasure, that would be too easy. I keep hold of matters that can’t be solved—why something went wrong, who was at fault, or how the difficulty was shared. These remain with me—no doubt as they do with many people. I see, too, looking back from that early youth I kept a reserve of what was beautiful, pleasurable, even sad, as a capital to draw on, and perhaps as evidence of a better self that I could consistently summon before the world.

I wrote a number of short stories rather quickly at the time. And then suddenly I was writing a novel. I said to [William] Maxwell [chief fiction editor of the New Yorker], “It’s markedly different from my previous work. Perhaps I’ve grown up as a writer, or the material’s different, but I begin to wonder whether some of my stories will eventually seem quite juvenile to me.”

Maxwell said, “I wouldn’t count on that. Rather, you’ll look back on them as things absolutely fresh and spontaneous, with a kind of innocence that you will only rarely capture in later work. Your later work may be more mature, riper, more imaginative, more inventive perhaps. But there will always be the freshness about the first work.”

—Shirley Hazzard

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers