Well, people often talk about the death of literature.
People have been speaking about it since shortly
after the first work of literature was ever made
but there's more and more talk about it.
It's been propelled by diminishing readership,
by what feels like an increasing apathy,
or even anxiety or even mistrust of literature
and the movement towards screens, everything being
on a screen and what would that mean for books which
aren't very well served on a screen.
It's not that you can't read a book on a screen
perfectly well but you can't read a book on a screen
that also has email and your calendar and texting.
Books can't compete with those kinds of media.
So we wonder will people read books?
There are still things and there will always be things that
only literature can do, only literature can communicate.
I don't think that literature is necessarily any better,
whatever than means, than film or dance or music.
In fact, I'm often drawn personally more
to film and dance than I am to literature
but I know that there are moments in my life
when I feel the need for literature and only for literature.
So for example, the mother of my oldest friend
passed away about week ago.
And I went down to visit her in Washington DC.
I live in New York. I was quite worried about what to say
and how to fill what I thought might be very awkward,
or even painful silences. And I brought poems,
about 20 poems. I read them to her and we talked
about them. And in that moment when we, together,
mostly just her, of course, but together, were confronting
this, the biggest moment of life which is death.
We relied on poetry.
Poems and stories and novels are very helpful
exactly when we most need language the most,
sort of dire, or urgent or existential moments of life.
Novels are meant to be read over the course of many
hours or many days. And even a story takes half an hour
to read. And I just wasn't sure, in this case, what her
energy level would be, so I wanted them to be quite
small, but even though that's the case, it's also true
that poetry is the most condensed form of literature
and in certain ways, it's the most pure form.
I don't think that novels are any less good than poetry
but novels has a lot to learn from poetry
in terms of what's possible, how direct one can be,
how concentrated language can be,
and how evocative and resonant.
Sometimes I think novels make the mistake
of being too much like their own description.
Somebody says, ''What is this book about?''
My dream is to write a novel where somebody would
have to say, "I could tell you, I suppose,
but that would really miss the point.
You'd just have to read it."
That, to my mind, is a good novel.
A novel that is its own synopsis,
just an expanded version of its synopsis,
comes awfully close to television actually.
Novels can still do something that poetry
does in terms of being kind of ineffable or mysterious
or not quite graspeable, just on a much larger scale.
All of my life, I have been more drawn to the visual arts
than to literature. And even still, when I'm feeling like
I can't remember why I wanted to be a writer,
I don't go to books, I actually go to paintings
or to sculpture. To me, the distinctions have been drawn
too sharply. The difference between a musician, a writer,
an artist, a dancer. We've categorized them,
segregated them, so that there's very , very little overlap
but in fact they're all just people who want to make
things that you could say have no use.
Everything in life has a use. The person who made
the camera that this is being shot with, made it
so that it could record something like this.
And a television or a computer that someone's watching
it on was made with specific functions in mind. A bridge
is made so that people can get from one land mass to
another. But novels and paintings and songs really ...
They might have effects in the world --
they might be political, they might be entertaining,
they might be objects of commerce, but they're not really
really made for any of those reasons. They're just made
for their own sake. Anyone who makes something
for its own sake, whether you try to have it published
or whether you're just rearranging twigs
on the ground because it pleases you,
people who do that are artists. And because we live
in a world in which you have to have a job and in which
it's expected that you will grow within your job
and because we like to have an answer to the question
'What is it that you do?'
You meet someone at a party.
They say ''What do you do?''
It makes us uncomfortable not to have an answer.
But the truth is, the different art forms are much, much
more similar than they are different.
When I'm not working on a book, I am somebody
who just moves through the world and sees nice things
and tries to remember them, but usually doesn't,
and hears jokes and tries to remember them but usually
doesn't and so on and has ideas that disappear,
But when I'm writing, I save those things
so that I can use them, rearrange them.
Nothing comes from nothing. I think that there's an
impression that books or art, making art is a much more
romantically creative act than it is, as if inspiration
strikes and suddenly, something appears
but that hasn't been my experience at all. It's much more
about being attentive to what's around and starting to
get to know what you like and what you find useful
and then collecting those things instead of everything.
Collecting those things and then figuring out what
what the most pleasing arrangement of them is for you.
There's nothing objective about it. It's not the case that
someone else will necessarily like it
but it really does feel like making collages with the
whole world as your cupboard of things to arrange.
Certainly in art, the most important things happen
on a subconscious level. When I approach a writing
project, I don't think of it like that. In fact, and I say this
not as a joke or to disparage myself, I really don't think about much at all.
about much at all. I'm just very open to what do I feel like
working on, what's interesting to me right now,
what am I curious about? But I never think about
what the potential use of something would be.
Like I was saying before, there's a quality of art
that is useless in the very, very best way.
That is the very highest compliment I can pay.
And if I started thinking about what I would achieve
for myself psychologically or in search of meaning
or in search of meaning or catharsis,
that's just another kind of use. Just in almost the same
way that trying to make something you could sell
for money is a kind of use. It's not to say that those two
thing might wouldn't be good in your life but I don't think
that they make a good work of art. They're not a good
starting point.
John [Delulo?] once said,"Nobody writes his first book.
It just happens. At a certain point, you find
that a printer is ... all these pages are coming out.
Oh my God, I can't believe I did this! I believe that.
Maybe it's a little different if you start late in life
incubating an idea for a long time but most people
when they write their first book, at a certain point,
they realize they have a book on their hands.
And the second book is different because then,
you have something that you're responding to,
you have your own expectations -- 'if you published
your first book, you have the world' expectations.
So I found the second book somewhat more difficult
because of that but I started the second book
before my first book was published so in a way,
I was able to escape some of those traps. But
then after I have written two novels, I wrote a work
of non-fiction about eating animals,about animal
farming. I think this is not a coincidence
that I decided to move in a different direction
because I was starting to feel the weight
of momentum. I didn't want to do a third thing
because I've done two previous things. I didn't want
to make a choice about tomorrow because of what
I did yesterday. So maybe even to a fault,
I resisted that and decided to move off
and try something else.
There are a lot of ways of talking about
choices in art. It's a mistake to think that
the way we talk about it retrospectively
as critics, which is very useful and interesting
but it's a mistake that that's the same language
of creation. Somebody once said, I can't remember
who, maybe it was Oscar Wilde, I can't remember.
He said, "There are only two kinds of objects
in the world: those that charm us and those that don't
charm us." Something can be charming in the most
completely simple way and for whatever reason,
it speaks to us. We like it. It is for us.
If it isn't charming, it's mundane. It's not that
we hate it, it's just that it has no great effect on us.
And each person, of course, has his own or her own
sense of what is charming. In a way, writing just
boils down to asking that question again and again
because it's charming or not. Something charming
can mean that it's very painful. It doesn't mean
that it's happy and beautiful. It can mean it's very
ugly, that it is funny. It can mean that it is serious.
It can be tragic. It can be comic.
Charming just means in a certain way,
that it's authentic and exceptional to you.
People often ask me, why don't I write about family
so often. I find that such a weird question.
I don't even know how to answer because the answer
feels so obvious to me. Nobody asks J.K. Rowling
why she writes about wizards so much.
That, to me, is weird. That's a weird choice she made
that requires some explanation because nobody
knows wizards. Nobody interacts with wizards.
Nobody can't fall asleep at night because of their
relationship to wizards but everyone has a family.
Even people whose families are absent.
Maybe especially people whose families are absent.
These are the main themes of life
and the main themes of literature since Genesis
so I assume I will always write about family.
Families is also especially important to me but
whatever will take the form of fathers
and sons-in-laws. Or it will take the form of
a married couple in a comedy. That I don't know.