“Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?” “Have I been what?”

As you may have heard already, Playboy magazine will be publishing an excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov’s soon-to-be-posthumously-published final unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, in its December issue. One might also add that the geniuses at the New Yorker turned down the opportunity to publish it. All of which is to set up a link to Nabokov’s very interesting 1964 interview with Playboy.

Henry Miller

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”   

“One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.”

“And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?”

“If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”
—-Henry Miller

Paris Review interview

Burroughs

Paris Review Interview with William S. Burroughs

J.M.G.

“Love is the only real dimension of the world.”

Here is audio of Adam Gopnik speaking with 2008 Nobel laureate J.M.G. Le Clezio at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.

Marilynne Robinson

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”

- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Paris Review Interview

Aldous Huxley

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”    - Aldous Huxley

The Paris Review Interview

Haruki Murakami

Here is a very interesting long interview with Haruki Marukami in GQ Korea from awhile back, translated from the Japanese over at The Self Divider.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Modernism Lovers Rejoyce

For an appreciation of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (first from the left), written by Julian Barnes in the Guardian, look here.

Also check out this interesting 1922 profile and interview of James Joyce (second from left) in Vanity Fair, written by Djuna Barnes.

Finally, there’s a new article on Ezra Pound (third from the left) in the New Yorker written by Louis Menand.

An interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Tell us what you really think.