“I never cease to be astonished by his insight, his freshness, his brevity (deep problems treated like cold baths: in and out as quickly as possible)…” Geoff Dyer praises the inexhaustible Friedrich Nietzsche.
Fiction and autobiography edition, featuring Somerset Maugham, Alexander Chee, Joan Didion, Jean Rhys, and Graham Greene, and (semi-estranged) half-sisters AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble “Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that, looking back, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.” — Somerset Maugham (in video above) “I sat down to write a conventionally autobiographical novel. . . .
Adam Levin discusses some novels that influenced him. The Roth and Wallace are no surprise, but it was a revelation to find Kosinski’s (riveting, controversial) The Painted Bird on the list.
Can a novelist write philosophically? Even some of those considered among the most philosophical have “answered with an emphatic no.” See also Percy & Kierkegaard.
“Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.” — Reynolds Price (February 1, 1933 – January 20, 2011)