“Until recently, I thought ‘occasional poetry’ meant that you wrote only occasionally.”

On meeting J. D. Salinger: “Then he said . . . ‘I'd like you to publish my novel.’ I said, ‘What novel?’ He said, ‘Oh, it isn't finished. It's about a kid in New York during the Christmas holidays.’”

“I don’t write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that’s not why I write. I work as an artist. All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics."

Describing a doctoral thesis on Sophie’s Choice: “There was a footnote, which I swear to you said, ‘Where the movie is obscure I will refer to William Styron's novel for clarification.’”

“The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.”

“When I did Dutch Shea, Jr., I knew the last line was going to be, ‘I believe in God.’”

“Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.”

On first discovering his sense of humor: “I stood up with my right hand gradually becoming noticeably weird and said: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cleave to duh woof of my mout.’”

“I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.”

“I wouldn’t say that I dislike the young. I’m simply not a fan of naïveté.”

“It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.”

“People are too busy putting things under microscopes and so forth. Creativity is greater than the sum of its parts.”

On fiddling with scenes from history: “Well, it's nothing new, you know. When President Reagan says the Nazi S.S. were as much victims as the Jews they murdered—wouldn't you call that fiddling?”

“You decide to be a violinist, you decide to be a sculptor or a painter, but you find yourself being a novelist.”

On why a person would insert a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his (or her) ass: “In order to bite the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. That's the only reason twerps do it. It's all that turns them on.”

“Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn’t mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.”

“Often when I am very tired, just before going to bed, while washing my face and brushing my teeth, my mind gets very clear . . .”

“[Nabokov’s] language is made visible . . . like a veil or transparent curtain. You cannot help seeing the curtain as you peek into the intimate rooms behind.”

“People are like animals and the city is full of people in strange plumage.”

“Writers who pontificate about their own use of language drive me right up the wall. In what spare time I have, I read the expert opinions of V. S. Pritchett and Edmund Wilson, who are to my mind the best-qualified authorities on the written English language.”

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

“When I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and there she was stuck up there, naked, on a bookcase.”

On when he writes: “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. The afternoon is the only time I have left. ”

On the New York theater audience: “I have a fine play in mind I’ll write for them someday. The curtain slides up on a stage bare except for a machine gun facing the audience, then the actor walks upstage, adjusts the machine gun, and blasts them.”

We Parisians kicked off our softball season last week with a game against DC Comics. It wasn’t what you would call a W—down twelve runs in the final inning, we came back to put a far less embarrassing defeat down in the books (final tally: 13 to …

  For almost a year, I have been helping the Waldenbooks Company in its efforts to get Americans to buy and read more books. One of the sad statistics of our society is that only 3% of the American public buys hard cover books. This points out that the home library, which was once such a staple for informed people, has lost much of its importance.

The following pages have been set aside as a kind of tribute to honor the work of Terry Southern, who died last October in New York City — appreciations, reminiscences, critiques, as well as some original work from his files.

In Italy in the summer of 1952 Truman Capote was asked by the director John Huston (on the recommendation of David Selznick, who had admired Capote’s work on an ill-fated Vittorio De Sica movie entitled Indiscretion of an American Wife) to collaborate with him on the script for a movie called Beat the Devil. 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

This issue is dedicated to Richard Howard and the poetry editors who have preceded him over the years—Donald Hall, X.J. Kennedy, Thomas Clark, Michael Benedikt, Jonathan Galassi and Patricia Storace.

On the magazine’s thirtieth anniversary, it seems appropriate enough to divulge all this information about prizes.

Last year this office received a letter from an English writer who reported that at the racetrack he had put a fiver on a horse named Paris Review—largely a sentimental choice (since he has published in this magazine) but also because the odds (33-1) seemed to beg a flyer bet—and that the horse had finished so far back in the pack he was writing to suggest a warning to others who might be swayed by such sentiments.

Terry Southern’s interview with the English novelist Henry Green (born Henry Yorke) has been an in-house favorite atThe Paris Review ever since it appeared in our nineteenth issue (Summer 1958). If Green was, in Southern’s borrowed description, a “writer’s writer’s writer,” theirs is an interviewer’s interview