The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Believer Books has collected, in alphabetical order, twenty-three conversations and correspondences between much admired writers and the writers they admire. The interviews include favorites gleaned from the pages of the Believer magazine along with previously unpublished conversations. The book is rife with astonishing insights and profound quips. To wit:

George Saunders: ‘I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really, viscerally, believe that everything matters, suffering is real, and death is imminent.’

Ian McEwan: ‘The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer.’

Jamaica Kincaid: ‘All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself—though, thank god I had never committed them to paper—I think are nonsense…. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn’t hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don’t believe in that all anymore.’

Janet Malcolm: ‘The narrator of my nonfiction pieces is not the same person I am—she is a lot more articulate and thinks of much cleverer things to say than I usually do.’

Paul Auster: ‘In my own case, I certainly don’t walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door…. I don’t burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.’

Tobias Wolff: ‘Each time out should be a swing for the fences. Don’t do base-running drills. You can do those on your own time.’