There is a tendency to over-exaggerate and over-romanticise the place of a writer in a revolution. That bothers me. I think it's inappropriate.
I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.
All literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature...
There are a lot of experimental novels that test the boundaries of what the novel is, and 'Conversations' is not one of those. It's conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side. Its basic structure is pretty conventional.
Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more - absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
It always surprises me when people say that the realm of the lyric is the personal, and the personal is not political. I just don't know how we can get to 2014 and say that with a straight face. When you think of a poet like Yeats, how can you say politics is not in the poem? When you think of Milosz, how can you say politics is not in the poem?
How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.
Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.
When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes.
My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.
When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.
It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.
Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
I believe that all literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature. . . . I'm not sure one can be a creative writer and a politician -- not a "good" politician.
There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.
Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character.
