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"You invent whole sections of something and then later some biographer wants to know which is true and what isn't, and you have to sit and think." In this short video produced in 2013, the late Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing shares anecdotes from her life as a writer. Currently, a search is on to appoint a new biographer for Lessing.
"There's nothing in here of any substance." Bob Odenkirk speaks about his debut collection of essays, published last October by McSweeney's, and why the book will enter the canon of good toilet literature.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz talks about the impact comic books had on him as he was growing up, as well as their cultural and literary significance. His novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books, 2007) was just named the best novel of the twenty-first century to date by a BBC Culture critics' poll.
"My secret wish was to write or make movies, preferably a novel that would be an instant classic." Val Wang speaks about the inspiration for her memoir, Beijing Bastard: Into the Wilds of a Changing China (Gotham Books, 2014).
"What a great poet is, is a mirror that he holds up to the audience, and the audience sees themselves." Poet and performance artist John Giorno speaks about his first encounter with poetry, the poets who influenced him, and the importance of memorization.
"I feel like I've always been taking notes. When I sit down to write, I'm trying to find a way to organize that mess, to find a form, to contain it, to control it." The poet and 2013 Pew Fellow speaks about her motivation to write and the themes that carry through her work.
"It should absolutely, completely undermine who you think you are—that's the mark of art to me." David Shields discusses his writing practice and reads from his book How Literature Saved My Life (Knopf, 2013). For more on Shields, read "Art vs. Life: A Quarrel Between David Shields and Caleb Powell" in the new issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Shields and Powell will discuss more on January 10 at the Poets & Writers Live event in San Francisco.
"Poetry is condensed language with an internal music." Poet, artist, and literary translator Sholeh Wolpé speaks about how growing up and living within different cultures has influenced her writing.
"You can't say anything qualitatively about the imagination being a great and nurturing place or a dangerous and terrible place—it's all that stuff." Debut novelist and Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle talks about his book, Wolf in White Van (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), which was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction.
"'How does it feel to be you?' That's the ultimate question for a fiction writer." The novelist speaks about his early influences and how he writes his characters. O'Nan's West of Sunset (Viking, 2015) is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
