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In an interview with Tonny Vorm, Umberto Eco speaks from his home in Milan about the "pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to prepare a story" and shares other words of wisdom and advice to offer to aspiring young writers. Eco's latest novel, Numero Zero, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon, was published in November by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
"Every human being has a creative impulse, and we all have the right to exercise this creative impulse." At the 2012 Louisiana Literature Festival, Patti Smith, whose new memoir, M Train, will be released on October 6 by Knopf, talks about creativity and what inspires her to write.
"There are two kinds of writing: One is very passionate and impulsive, and it can be extremely emotional. Then the other writing is more cool and maybe classical and more carefully shaped.” Joyce Carol Oates, whose memoir The Lost Landscape was published this month by Ecco, describes the different states of mind that have inspired her work.
“Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it's a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.” Lydia Davis, whose latest collection of stories, Can't and Won't, was released in paperback by Picador in March, offers practical and reassuring advice for writers.
The Northern Irish novelist and poet reads from his poetry collections at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark in 2013. Laird's debut collection, To a Fault (Faber & Faber, 2005), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His latest collection, Go Giants, was published by Norton in 2013.
"I'm drawn to the beauty of sentences, I'm drawn even to the beauty in how emotion is portrayed in fiction." The award-winning author meditates on the idea of beauty in literature, as well as in life, and how it inspires her writing.
”I have a fair amount of fear when I am writing a book. You need to hate your work, but if you hate it too much it will stop you from writing," says Jeffrey Eugendies in this conversation with Jonathan Safran Foer, moderated by journalist Martin Krasnik and filmed at the Louisiana Literature Festival in 2012.
"There is a distinct difference between reading a novel and reading a novel by someone you know." The author of acclaimed novels such as Atonement, Amsterdam, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach discusses his latest novel, Sweet Tooth, at last year's Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
