Thursday, May 14, 2009

Domestication/Fiction vs Nonfiction

Should a writer allow himself to be domesticated? What are the consequences? Better to ask other writers. It is a tough choice: to be a normal human being or to be a writer. A writer has to stay on the margins of society to observe what goes on in the centre.

David Foster Wallace warned his wife, Green, that if he killed himself she'd be "the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened."

David Foster Wallace to Don DeLillo: "I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing non-fiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I'm Supposed to Do..." (The New Yorker, March 9, 2009)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you mean writers are not normal human beings?(chuckle!)

Unknown said...

Writers can be normal human beings. But many great writers have been shown to be eccentric):