We'll always have Paris
15 November 2004. Inspired by .
"You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that." - Ernest Hemingway
Interviewer: "How do you name your characters?"
Dorothy Parker: "The telephone book and from the obituary columns."
For a particular essay (which I titled "Building an orange*") written for one of my courses in the final year of my degree, I spent hours - much longer than I did writing the thing, in fact - reading through the interviews in The Paris Review. Not once, during the days I spent by those university library shelves, did a single other person ever so much as pick up one of the volumes.
I was amazed, and still am, at the quality of the interviewees - and also by that of the interviews themselves. If you really want to study creative writing, or at least creative writers, just go read those and have done with it.
And now MeFi has revealed that, thanks to the (American) National Endowment of the Arts, they're gradually appearing online, and in their original form too, including scans of the highly revealing 'page of working manuscript'.
You're waiting for what, exactly? Go, download, read, share.
* the title, by the way, was taken from a quote from this interview with Truman Capote.