Auctorial Quotations in P&W

The January/February issue of Poets & Writers celebrated the magazine's twentieth anniversary, and included year-by-year capsule which highlighted each year's literary highlights, with a focus on items appearing in the magazine. By far the most interesting aspect of these capsules were the quotations from various writers profiled in the magazine. For me, these were the highlights:

"I don't write novels where people aren't victims. I can't imagine feeling it was worthwhile to write a novel if there weren't a genuine victim in it, if something terrible didn't happen to someone who had a justifiable claim to our emotions." - John Irving, 1991

"If you search in the background of any serious writer, it isn't very long before you come upon a major deprivation of one sort or another -- which the writer through the exercise of imagination tries to overcome or compensate for, or even make not have happened." - William Maxwell, 1994

"As far as I'm concerned, I've never considered myself anything but an American writer. I have a passionate relationship with my own language, and that for me is more important than anything I do with it. What I really want to do with English is make love to it." - Harry Matthews, 1996

"Writing is such an internal, interior thing that it can hardly be reached by you, much less by another person. I can't tell you how to write, no more than you can tell me. We're all different from one another, even in the way we breathe. Writers must learn to trust themselves." - Eudora Welty, 1997

"One of the great things about fiction is that if I write an asshole into a story it has to be me. I can't generate him. And it's always funny in the reviews [when] they say my stories are full of losers. I know where I got all those things. I didn't just make them up. I think it's ritualized humanity." - George Saunders, 2000

"I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do." - Kenneth Koch, 2002

"You never know everything that's going to happen to you when you are writing a short story or a novel. You know where you are starting out and you know your destination, but you never know what the weather is going to be like, how the crop is going to look, or how the leaves on the trees are going to change." - Ernest J. Gaines, 2005