‘Write As If Your Parents Were Dead’
Phillip Roth is said to have tendered the following advice–on the art of writing–to Ian McEwan : ‘Write as if your parents were dead.’ By this, I take it that Roth meant for McEwan to write with a...
View ArticleWriting And The Hundred Book Summer
Shortly after I have returned my student’s writing assignments to them, I start setting up appointments with those students who want to talk about their grades. In these consultations, as I go over the...
View ArticleHermione Lee On Wasting Nothing
The Art of Biography series of interviews at The Paris Review includes the following exchange between Hermione Lee and Louisa Thomas in No. 4: INTERVIEWER This is something you consistently look at—the...
View ArticleThe Pleasures Of Books Never To Be Written
In ‘The Flaubert Apocrypha’ (from: Flaubert’s Parrot, Vintage International, New York, 1990, pp. 115-116), Julian Barnes writes: If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to a brothel which doesn’t...
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