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James Jones
© Nancy Crampton
JAMES JONES
The Art of Fiction No. 22
Interviewed by Nelson Aldrich
Issue 20, Autumn-Winter 1958-1959
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From the Interview
INTERVIEWER
Having left America as you have, do you think of the move as a political gesture, a cutting off of national affiliation?

JONES
Oh no. Not at all. I’m an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much—and its big, awkward, sprawling people. Anyway, I don’t like politics; and I don’t make “political gestures,” as you call it. I don’t even believe in politics. To me politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous, but generally just painful, chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it. Politics is like having diabetes. It’s a science, a catch-as-catch-can science, which has grown up out of simple animal necessity more than anything else. If I were twice as big as I am, and twice as physically strong, I think I’d be a total anarchist.
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John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ring Lardner, Stendhal, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy
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