Philip Roth:
"Why is it that when they talk about the facts they feel they're on more solid ground than when they talk about the fiction? The truth is that the facts are much more refractory and unmanageable and inconclusive, and can actually kill the very sort of inquiry that imagination opens up."
--from THE FACTS: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
So, even without divulging too much of my own life, and its embarrassments, in this venue, I have stuck far too much to the solidity of facts rather than the for the openings of fiction, and so have I, as Mr. Roth observes, limited the scope of writing. Compelled to be reserved by such a public venue, originally intended as a field of literary criticism and that sort of thing, I've written about things that influence, that move, that effect the life of the mind, such as it is.
But no Roth am I.
The inquiry I should have aimed for would have been freer, and fictional, and I've been too conservative for that. I tried to allow for a kind of work to emerge without trying to shape it too much, to let it come forth. And now I cannot make heads or tails of it, and I am tired of the set-up of its little tales. Hospitality is in all of us, in the best of us, but one needs a job and the ability to make a living corresponding to where he lives, a career.
--from THE FACTS: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
So, even without divulging too much of my own life, and its embarrassments, in this venue, I have stuck far too much to the solidity of facts rather than the for the openings of fiction, and so have I, as Mr. Roth observes, limited the scope of writing. Compelled to be reserved by such a public venue, originally intended as a field of literary criticism and that sort of thing, I've written about things that influence, that move, that effect the life of the mind, such as it is.
But no Roth am I.
The inquiry I should have aimed for would have been freer, and fictional, and I've been too conservative for that. I tried to allow for a kind of work to emerge without trying to shape it too much, to let it come forth. And now I cannot make heads or tails of it, and I am tired of the set-up of its little tales. Hospitality is in all of us, in the best of us, but one needs a job and the ability to make a living corresponding to where he lives, a career.
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