A few words from writers today on novels and on writing:
But there is a certain diffidence about me, not very obvious socially, to my own mind, that prevents me from going all out, as you call it. I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse. Why? Because I am working toward something and have not yet arrived. I once mentioned to you, I think, that one of the things that made life difficult for me was that I wanted to write before I had sufficient maturity to write as "high" as I wished and so I had a very arduous and painful apprenticeship and still am undergoing it. This journeyman idea has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. It makes me a craftsman–and few writers are that–but it gives me a refuge from the peril of final accomplishment. "Lord, pardon me, I’m still preparing, not fully a man as yet."
-
The burden of [Frank O'Connor's] criticism is that fiction has not been faithful to Stendhal’s definition of the novel as a mirror dawdling down a road. Instead it has insisted upon going behind the mirror, becoming self-absorbed and indifferent to that crowd which it had once brilliantly particularized . . . On the whole, he regretted this development. What he longed for was candor, not circumlocution, cards on the table rather than held close to the chest. For this reason and others, he could not approve of Joyce, feeling that when artistic method had become so dominating life was lost. He liked and practiced a more open confrontation.
- Richard Ellmann about Frank O’Connor in his introduction to O’Connor’s Collected Stories
