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INTERVIEWER
Have you spent a good part of your writing life getting even?
GASS
Yes . . . yes. Getting even is one great reason for writing. The precise statement of the motive is tricky, but the clearest expression of my unwholesome nature and my mean motives (apart from trying to write well) appears in a line I like in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” The character says, “I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.” But maybe I say it’s a motive because I like the line. Anyway, my work proceeds almost always from a sense of aggression. And usually I am in my best working mood when I am, on the page, very combative, very hostile. That’s true even when I write to praise, as is often the case.
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| Authors Mentioned |
| John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Carlos Fuentes, William Gaddis, Malcolm Lowry, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Wolfe, Colette, Theodore Dreiser, George Eliot, John Hawkes, G. Cabrera Infante, Henry James, James Joyce, Herman Melville, John Milton, Gabriel García Márquez, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alexander Pope, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, John Crowe Ransom, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Paul Valéry |
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