[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
paris review
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William S. Burroughs on Why He Stopped Taking Drugs
What Burroughs revealed in his 1965 conversation with The Paris Review.
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Gabriel García Márquez on the Solitude of Writers and Dictators
What Márquez told Peter H. Stone in a 1981 interview with The Paris Review.
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Eudora Welty on Moving from Writer to Reader
What her 1972 Paris Review interview reveals about her approach to the craft.
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Ray Bradbury on Science Fiction and the Art of What’s Possible
“Science fiction is the fiction of ideas.”
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Ursula K. Le Guin On ‘Starting Late’ as a Writer
LE GUIN: My mother had always wanted to write. She told me this only after she’d started writing. She waited until she got the kids out of the house, until she was free of responsibility for anybody except her husband. Very typical of her generation. She was in her fifties when she started writing—for kids, […]
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Lorrie Moore on the Difficulties of Constructing a Writing Life
In The Paris Review, the celebrated writer reveals the struggles of creativity.
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The Pre-Internet Small Town
Mary Karr, in The Paris Review, on her small-town roots.
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Philip Levine’s Advice for ‘Making It’ as a Writer
“Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it?”
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Maya Angelou: 1928-2014
Angelou, in 1990, on the moment she decided to write.