Orhan Pamuk em entrevista à Scotish Review of Books

Recently a crime novelist said he couldn’t understand how literary novelists take ten years to write a novel. He reckoned that nine of them must have been spent in a bar.

Okay. It really depends on the novelist.

You cannot accuse anyone for writing fast or slow. There is the story of Stendhal writing The Charterhouse of Parma in 42 days, probably he was lying the other way around, maybe he also went some places to drink, but wrote it, I guess in 100 days. Or Faulkner who said he wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks while working in a power plant.

Fitzgerald said it took him the same time to write The Great Gatsby.

There’s nothing fancy about that. But you cannot write another Great Gatsby in the next six weeks. Shakespeare did it, sometimes Dostoevsky did it when he was in his late forties and early fifties. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, they were writing one masterpiece after another. I like to entertain thoughts about these subjects. In your youth you only desire to write great books, at my age you see the whole humanity.

Error-Rome

The same stages as my life

My poetry has passed through the same stages as my life; from a solitary childhood and an adolescence cornered in distant, isolated countries, I set out to make myself a part of the great human multitude. My life matured, and that is all. It was in the style of the last century for poets to be tormented melancholiacs. But there can be poets who know life, who know its problems, and who survive by crossing through the currents. And who pass through sadness to plenitude.

Pablo Neruda em entrevista à Paris Review.

Conversations with History: Orhan Pamuk

Entrevista

Como se reflecte numa faculdade de Letras a alteração de mentalidades que considera hoje irrelevantes as ideias e as Humanidades, para dar primado absoluto ao conhecimento prático que assegure emprego?

É uma espécie de discurso asfixiante. O que é uma brutalidade – as pessoas entram aqui vindas do liceu, estão três anos, o tempo de uma licenciatura (quanto a mim, seria melhor se fossem quatro), e durante esses três anos os alunos ouvem obsessivamente falar de saídas profissionais, empregabilidade, etc., quando deviam estar três anos a ler, a ir ao cinema, ocupados com actividades que os educam.

A noção de educação deixou de interessar. A brutalidade prática é tal, que a única coisa que interessa é a saída profissional. E isto é algo que vai ter custos enormes no país, nem que sejam custos de um ponto de vista moral, da auto-estima das pessoas, etc.

António Feijó, Director da Faculdade de Letras, em entrevista ao i.

António José Teixeira entrevista Luís Miguel Cintra

Ruy Belo

De ver.

Feliz aniversário, Ezra

Carlito Azevedo em entrevista

Não acredito que a poesia tenha encontrado um lugar ao sol do mercado editorial, nem que, em suas melhores e mais honestas experiências, seja isso o que ela busca. E tenho a pretensão de ter encontrado a razão desse tão longo divórcio entre a poesia e o comércio na Roma Imperial, no século 1º a.C.: é o que chamo de "a maldição de Horácio".
Em Roma, e naquele momento, surgiu o primeiro esboço de algo semelhante às nossas livrarias, as "tabernae librariae", pequenas lojas onde os livros podiam ser folheados e até comprados por gente de fora dos círculos intelectuais dos escritores. Pois bem, é ali, em pleno nascimento do comércio do livro, que o poeta Horácio, o mesmo do "carpe diem", decide se recusar a ter seus livros expostos ao manuseio ou venda nas "tabernae librariae".

Vale a pena continuar a ler aqui.

António Lobo Antunes

Em entrevista à Paris Review.

The idea of the poem

Christopher Logue em entrevista

It is the idea of the poem that has inspired me. I always read Chapman and Pope, just to see what as poets they did. Pope was the last poet to translate the Iliad into English verse. I look at new translations as they come out, that of Professors Knox and Fagels, for example, which is a touch sharper than Professor Lattimore’s. However, these three professors may have been reading Homer all their lives, but he’s failed to teach them what verse is. They do not write verse. They write blank-verse prose, sired by E. V. Rieu, via Lang, Leaf, and Myers out of the King James Bible. It burbles along but it doesn’t scan. Still, such things make a bomb for the publishers. Those who aspire to poetical know-how usually buy Lattimore or a Rieu-type Homer. I have never seen any evidence that any of them get past the introductions. But the professors love it. They are the translation police. It is easy to see why: it keeps Homer in their hands. If they had to teach Homer via Chapman or Pope or even Logue, they would have to teach Chapman and Pope and Logue. And that is, quite frankly, just asking too much. Heterodidacts are like that. Critically-minded scholars, such as Jasper Griffin, M. S. Silk, Charles Beye, W. A. Camps and Malcolm Willcock tell me much more than such translators.

...

So much of the poetry that is published and praised today seems to be the work of self-indulgent windbags, people who imagine that self-expression is a justification for writing. It is easier to become the president of the United States than a good poet. Any poet writing in English is expected to produce striking phrases, quotable lines, memorable passages, and just plainly beautiful things. And this the minimum.

Coolest hair

Auden, Entrevista à Paris Review, 1972

Entrevistador: Do you have any aids for inspiration?
Auden: I never write when I’m drunk.
(...)
Entrevistador: Have you read, or tried to read, Finnegans Wake?
Auden: I’m not very good on Joyce. Obviously he’s a very great genius—but his work is simply too long.

Gamado daqui.

Isto é para ti, o resto está no YouTube

"It's a Wonderful Life didn't do very well (...) But it's my favorite picture and was Frank Capra's."

Leonard Cohen, Entrevista

José Saramago

Entrevista à Paris Review (1998).

Uma entrevista a Borges em 1977

I remember when I read a biography of Oscar Wilde by Hesketh Pearson. Then there was a long discussion going on about predestination and free will. And he asked Wilde what he made of free will. Then he answered in a story. The story seemed somewhat irrelevant, but it wasn’t. He said — yes, yes, yes, some nails, pins, and needles lived in the neighborhood of a magnet, and one of them said, “I think we should pay a visit to the magnet.” And the other said, “I think it is our duty to visit the magnet.” The other said, “This must be done right now. No delay can be allowed.” Then when they were saying those things, without being aware of it, they were all rushing towards the magnet, who smiled because he knew that they were coming to visit him. You can imagine a magnet smiling. You see, there Wilde gave his opinion, and his opinion was that we think we are free agents, but of course we’re not….
But I would like to make it clear that if any ideas are to be found in what I write, those ideas came after the writing. I mean, I began by the writing, I began by the story, I began with the dream, if you want to call it that. And then afterwards, perhaps, some idea came of it. But I didn’t begin, as I say, by the moral and then writing a fable to prove it.

Ler o resto aqui.

É de ver

A parte 1, 2 & 3.

Uma entrevista a Jean-Luc Godard

«Acho que era a juventude que devia influenciar o cinema e não o contrário.» (Entre outras coisas.)