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ANGUS WILSON
The Art of Fiction No. 20
Interviewed by Michael Millgate
Issue 17, Autumn-Winter 1957
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From the Interview
INTERVIEWER
In writing about Anglo-Saxon attitudes, then, you aren’t seeking to change them?

WILSON
Oh, no. I don’t think it’s the novelist’s job to give answers. He’s only concerned with exposing the human situation, and if his books do good incidentally that’s all well and good. It’s rather like sermons.

INTERVIEWER
Isn’t a sermon intended to do good?

WILSON
Only to the individual, not to society. It’s designed to touch the heart—and I hope my books touch the heart now and again.
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Selections From the Current Issue
Winter 2009
INTERVIEW
Ha Jin, Mary Karr
FICTION
Aimee Bender, Patricio Pron
MEMOIR
Benjamin Percy
POETRY
Marianne Boruch, Robert Hass, Dorothea Tanning
PHOTOGRAPHS
Massimo Vitali
Authors Mentioned
E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Frank O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Tennessee Williams, Honoré de Balzac, Elizabeth Bowen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, John Osborne, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Ivan Turgenev, Hugh Walpole, Virginia Woolf, Émile Zola
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