Excerpts from Q&As with Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Kurt Vonnegut, John Gardner, Elizabeth Bishop, Rebecca West, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Joan Didion — just a few of the magnificent interviews republished as The Paris Review Interviews Volume 1 and Volume 2

DOROTHY PARKER // 1956 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
And during this time you were writing poems?

PARKER
My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated — as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture.

. . . 

SAUL BELLOW // 1966 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
You have on occasion divided recent American fiction into what you call the “cleans” and the “dirties.” The former, I gather, tend to be conservative and easily optimistic, the latter the eternal naysayers, rebels, iconoclasts. Do you feel this is still pretty much the picture of American fiction today?

BELLOW
I feel that both choices are rudimentary and pitiful, and though I know the uselessness of advocating any given path to other novelists, I am still inclined to say, Leave both these extremes. They are useless, childish. No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers and poets in contempt. They do it because they get no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question. What does the radicalism of radical writers nowadays amount to? Most of it is hand-me-down bohemianism, sentimental populism, D.H. Lawrence-and-water, or imitation Sartre. For American writers radicalism is a question of honor. They must be radicals for the sake of their dignity. They see it as their function, and a noble function, to say nay, and to bite not only the hand that feeds them (and feeds them with comic abundance, I might add) but almost any other hand held out to them. Their radicalism, however, is contentless. A genuine radicalism, which truly challenges authority, we need desperately. But a radicalism of posture is easy and banal. Radical criticism requires knowledge, not posture, not slogans, not rant. People who maintain their dignity as artists, in a small way, by being mischievous on television, simply delight the networks and the public. True radicalism requires homework — thought. Of the cleans, on the other hand, there isn’t much to say. They seem faded.

. . . 

EUDORA WELTY // 1972 (volume 2)

INTERVIEWER
Do you write for your friends?

WELTY
At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it. I believe if I stopped to wonder what so-and-so would think, or what I’d feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed. I care what my friends think, very deeply — and it’s only after they’ve read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down. But in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates.

It’s so much an inward thing that reading the proofs later can be a real shock. When I received them for my first book — no, I guess it was for Delta Wedding — I thought, I didn’t write this. It was a page of dialogue — I might as well have never seen it before. I wrote to my editor, John Woodburn, and told him something had happened to that page in the typesetting. He was kind, not even surprised — maybe this happens to all writers. He called me up and read me from the manuscript, word for word what the proofs said. Proofs don’t shock me any longer, yet there’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader, and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d gotten sunburned.

. . . 

KURT VONNEGUT // 1977 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
It must have been a thrill to fire such a weapon [a 240-millimeter howitzer].

VONNEGUT
Not really. We would put the shell in there, and then we would throw in bags of very slow and patient explosives. They were damp dog biscuits, I think. We would close the breech, and then trip a hammer which hit a fulminate of mercury percussion cap, which spit fire at the damp dog biscuits. The main idea, I think, was to generate steam. After a while, we could hear these cooking sounds. It was a lot like cooking a turkey. In utter safety, I think, we could have opened the breech block from time to time, and basted the shell. Eventually, though, the howitzer always got restless. And finally it would heave back on its recoil mechanism, and it would have to expectorate the shell. The shell would come floating out like the Goodyear blimp. If we had had a stepladder, we could have painted “Fuck Hitler” on the shell as it left the gun. Helicopters could have taken after it and shot it down.

. . . 

JOHN GARDNER // 1979 (volume 2)

INTERVIEWER
But insofar as you are a philosophical novelist, what is it that you do?

GARDNER
I write novels, books about people, and what I write is philosophical only in a limited way. The human dramas that interest me — stir me to excitement and, loosely, vision — are always rooted in serious philosophical questions. That is, I’m bored by plots that depend on the psychological or sociological quirks of the main characters — mere melodramas of healthy against sick — stories that, subtly or otherwise, merely preach. Art as the wisdom of Marcus Welby, M.D. Granted, most of fiction’s great heroes are at least slightly crazy, from Achilles to Captain Ahab, but the problems that make great heroes act are the problems no sane man could have gotten around either. Achilles, in his nobler, saner moments, lays down the whole moral code of The Iliad. But the violence and anger triggered by war, the human passions that overwhelm Achilles’ reason and make him the greatest criminal in all fiction — they’re just as much a problem for lesser, more ordinary people. The same with Ahab’s desire to pierce the Mask, smash through to absolute knowledge. Ahab’s crazy, so he actually tries it, but the same Mask leers at all of us. So, when I write a piece of fiction I select my characters and settings and so on because they have a bearing, at least to me, on the old unanswerable philosophical questions. And as I spin out the action, I’m always very concerned with springing discoveries — actual philosophical discoveries. But at the same time I’m concerned — and finally more concerned — with what the discoveries do to the character who makes them, and to the people around him. It’s that that makes me not really a philosopher, but a novelist.

. . . 

ELIZABETH BISHOP // 1981 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
You were living in Brazil, weren’t you, when you won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956?

BISHOP
Yes, it was pretty funny. We lived on top of a mountain peak — really way up in the air. I was alone in the house with Maria, the cook. A friend had gone to market. The telephone rang. It was a newsman from the American embassy and he asked me who it was in English, and of course it was very rare to hear someone speak in English. He said, Do you know you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize? Well, I thought it was a joke. I said, Oh, come on. And he said, Don’t you hear me? The telephone connection was very bad and he was shrieking. And I said, Oh, it can’t be. But he said it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t make an impression on Maria with this news, but I felt I had to share it, so I hurried down the mountain a half mile or so to the next house, but no one was at home. I thought I should do something to celebrate, have a glass of wine or something. But all I could find in that house, a friend’s, were some cookies from America, some awful chocolate cookies — Oreos, I think — so I ended up eating two of those. And that’s how I celebrated winning the Pulitzer Prize.

The next day there was a picture in the afternoon paper — they take such things very seriously in Brazil — and the day after that my Brazilian friend went to market again. There was a big covered market with stalls for every kind of comestible, and there was one vegetable man we always went to. He said, Wasn’t that Dona Elizabeth’s picture in the paper yesterday? She said, Yes, it was — she won a prize. And he said, You know, it’s amazing! Last week Senora (Somebody) took a chance on a bicycle and she won! My customers are so lucky!

Isn’t that marvelous?

. . . 

REBECCA WEST // 1981 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
You’ve never written for the stage yourself?

WEST
I’ve had so little time to write. Also, theatrical people can’t be bothered with me. I wrote a play in the twenties, which I think had lovely stuff in it, Goodbye Nicholas, and fourteen copies were lost by managers, fourteen, that’s really true, and I just gave up. One of them, who lost three, was a man called Barry Jackson, who was at the Birmingham Repertory Theater; after we’d had terrific apologies and that kind of thing, about a year later he met me in the bar of some theater and said, Rebecca, why have you never written a play? They are like that.

. . . 

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ // 1981 (volume 2)

INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about [my using a] tape recorder?

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
The problem is that the moment you know the interview is being taped, your attitude changes. In my case I immediately take a defensive attitude. As a journalist, I feel that we still haven’t learned how to use a tape recorder to do an interview. The best way, I feel, is to have a long conversation without the journalist taking any notes. Then afterward he should reminisce about the conversation and write it down as an impression of what he felt, not necessarily using the exact words expressed. Another useful method is to take notes and then interpret them with a certain loyalty to the person interviewed. What ticks you off about tape recording everything is that it is not loyal to the person who is being interviewed, because it even records and remembers when you make an ass of yourself. That’s why when there is a tape recorder, I am conscious that I’m being interviewed; when there isn’t a tape recorder, I talk in an unconscious and completely natural way.

. . . 

JOAN DIDION // 2006 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
You mentioned rereading Moby-Dick. Do you do much rereading?

DIDION
I often reread Victory, which is maybe my favorite book in the world.

INTERVIEWER
Conrad? Really? Why?

DIDION
The story is told third hand. It’s not a story the narrator even heard from someone who experienced it. The narrator seems to have heard it from people he runs into around the Malacca Strait. So there’s this fantastic distancing of the narrative, except that when you’re in the middle of it, it remains very immediate. It’s incredibly skillful. I have never started a novel — I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel — I’ve never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing. In the same way, John and I always prepared for writing a movie by watching “The Third Man.” It’s perfectly told.