Two of my favourite books are Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn.'
The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously
Longest book was '2666' by Roberto Bolano, and it was an irregular reading experience. I read the first four parts during a cross-country plane trip, reading at slightly slower-than-usual speed but surprised at how accessible the book was compared with 'The Savage Detectives.'
When I get about five readers I can rub together in one genre, I leave that genre and go somewhere else. And this is due to a vow that I made myself when I started writing - that if I had any success at all, I would not be bound to one form of writing. That I would write what moves me. The only way I can see me surviving and doing more than one book is to present the readers with a Dan Simmons novel, with whatever tropes and protocols from whatever genre I want to borrow them. If that builds a Dan Simmons readership, well then, okay. Otherwise, forget about it. I'd rather drive a truck.
Nobody wants to take a risk with scripts that push the envelope.
I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket.
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.
James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.
Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.
It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.
I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.
You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.
I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface.
One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.
And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!
Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.
It is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I've learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the 'grammelot.'
Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they're even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they're confined.
I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.
It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.
The Beat Generation - that term is even more familiar now, even more than say the '70s. Hype is built and established and people link it back to a certain generation, in this case the '40s and '50s. Now everyone knows that that group was the Beat Generation.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
