Bookselling This Week: What has been the most satisfying part about all your success?
David Foster Wallace: What do you mean by success?
BTW: Being accepted by a major publisher, all the acclaim.
DFW: Well there’s no better feeling than working hard at something and having it come out good, even before you put the stamp on it. But with all the public stuff… it’s sort of how you like people to be nice to your child. There’s so much bullshit to trying to get accepted – reading a mean letter from someone you don’t even know, getting rejected. I think you need to invest way more into how it feels when you are in a room writing by yourself.
Tag: interview
Once the music plays, it creates me.
I like the idea that you let culture use you as its instrument. What gets in the way is being too clever, or worrying about how something is going to function, or where it’s going to be. When you start thinking of something as art, you’re fucked: you’re never going to advance.
I never think of anything as finished until it’s released. If you came round to my house one day and I said, “This is something I haven’t finished yet, but it’s going to be much better when I’ve mixed it,” and blah blah blah – all these defenses – and then I played it for you, that’s one thing. But if you pick up my album at a shop and take it home and put it on your record player and I’m not there to give you all those excuses, that’s quite a different thing. A work is finished for me when it’s no longer in the domain of my excuses about it.
Brian Eno in Interview magazine, 1990. By the way, there is a massive archive of interviews with Brian Eno, which I am wont to plunder when I need a little something to think on.
Brian Eno – Music For Airports Interview:
I thought that it would be much better to have music that said, “Well, if you die, it doesn’t really matter.”
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
It kind of puzzles me that people seem so keen on asking fiction writers straightforward interview-type questions, since if the fiction writers really thought interesting stuff could be talked about straightforwardly they probably wouldn’t have become fiction writers.
From an interview with David Foster Wallace. (via kottke)
DAVIDLYNCH.COM presents INTERVIEW PROJECT
20,000-mile road trip + interviews with folks. Launching on June 1.
A couple years ago, Stanford hosted an evening with Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass. Over an hour of conversation (pdf transcript), AND they made the audience submit questions via notecards! A good bit from Glass:
Someone recently was showing me a book that this person was writing and she said, do you have any advice? I said, Yes, my advice is: Don’t stop working before the book is finished. And I quickly added: Because it’s in the last moments of the work that the quality appears. It doesn’t happen at the beginning; it happens at the end.
An interesting bit from a David Foster Wallace reading circa Infinite Jest:
I would go to halfway houses and just sit there. I lurked a lot. Nice thing about halfway houses is they are real run-down and real sloppy and you can just sit around. And the more you sit around looking uncomfortable and out of place, the more it looks like you belong there. Some of the people knew this [breaking and entering] stuff very well and they loved to talk about it. And nobody is as talkative as a drug addict who just had his drugs taken away.
It’s paired with a decent interview where he predicts the rise of curators and filters in internetland, and also mentions how important an editor is…
I, of course, get all wrapped up. ”I know. I’ll have an allusion to a Russian thing that’s half true and only people who speak Russian will know.” Great, you are now talking to exactly one person on the planet earth.
Mark Larson 