Anyway, what’s the point of a plot, you know? Has life got a plot? Not that I know of. So why should a novel have a plot? But it has to have some kind of story. It has to have some kind of structure.
Academy of Achievement interview, 18 October 2017 source ↗
I thought I was a hedonist at the time, but when I look back I was always working. I am always working. I work every day. I never give parties; I never gave them.
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked.
Yes, I do. I do, but I were part company with certain schools of writers that I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer. I don’t believe that. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you’re not writing, when your writing’s not dealing with a concrete political situation.
Yes, and, I'll turn your comment around and say it's fairly close to the biological ratio of men and women. It's all the other fields that are aberrant. … This is the normal field, right? Because it is a much more even distribution between men and women, absolutely.
I keep office hours. I work from 9:30 to 6:00. It’s curious. In the morning, I could just about tie my shoelaces before noon, but I can write. It’s obviously a different part of my brain that’s working.
I think it begins as a kind of tension in space. There’s something out there and it’s waiting for the big bang, and I have to get that into my head. I have a composer friend in Ireland, and he beautifully said, “I have this scream in my head and I have to get it into the orchestra. I have to get it into the music.” But I wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as that. But I have this tension. I have this thing that has to be done. And the problem is, you see, once you’ve got the first paragraph down and you’ve got the tone, then the bloody book is written. All you have to do is fill it in then, which makes it really boring. I mean I’d like to be like one of those Japanese artists, you know, just go shoop ! and it’s done. But no, it takes years.
But my own mottos are, “Don’t imagine for a moment that you’re going to be able to express yourself.” ... And most aspiring artists think, “I have something to say.”
Adam Zagajewski, Yehuda Amichai, Twyla Tharp, Wisława Szymborska, Ursula K. Le Guin, Geoff Dyer
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