sunday morning

"The more I write, the more I find that the most personal work will be understood the least. People do not expose themselves easily to intimacy. It's much easier for people to respond to lighter books, like The Zigzag Kid or Someone to Run With.

Yet for me, the books that really matter, the books that I cannot imagine my life without having written, are the more demanding ones, like The Book of Intimate Grammar, Be My Knife, See Under: Love, and the book I'm writing now. I may occassionally like to write an entertaining book, but I take literature seriously. You're dealing with explosives. You can change a reader's life, and you can change-you should change, I think-your own life.

Usually a lighter book will serve as a kind of recovery for me. I devastate myself when I write a certain kind of book-there is a process of dismantling my personality. All of my defgense mechanisms, everything settled and functioning, all the things concealed in life break into pieces, because I need to go to the place within me that is cracked, that is fragile, that is not taken for granted. I come out of these books devastated. I don't complain, of course. This is how books should be written."

David Grossman in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4

: 23 Jan 2011 11:42 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem