JOHN CROWLEY INTERVIEWS

"One of the reasons you write fiction is because you can create your own world. You need that constant sense of possibility. If you don't feel that sense of possibility on your own life, don't even feel a craving for that kind of possibility and change, it makes it difficult to write. SF and fantasy share a dissatisfaction with how things are arranged. In the past it might have been more like a religious impulse than a scientific impulse. It's what you might call a holy dissatisfaction with the fact that wishes can't come true, that you can't make things better, you can't have what you want - not in the sense of material things, but something that can satisfy you ultimately. Whatever literary fiat you make you still want something different." - CNB

One of the jobs I set myself is to make it convincing that realistic and ordinary people are inhabiting fictional worlds where the miraculous and the unreal and the bizarre and the awful don't happen--then project them into a world where such things can happen." - RG

"One of the things I tend to write about is the solving of mysteries, or of mysterious things coming to be and people trying to understand them." - RG

"The mysteries that have intrigued me are those moments when the world exfoliates in some sudden, surprising way." - TMD

"One of the values of magic, the humanist-magical option, is to say that man is really here to learn, to understand everything, and to gain powers from nature because God has provided nature to give powers to man." - RG

"I'm not really interested in solving problems. I don't really have answers. My wife says 'There's all this funny uncertainty in your writing. Not only the characters are always asking questions, the narrator is always asking questions, ending sentences with question marks.' Maybe because it's really a literary endeavour, to make people excited and affect them emotionally and put them in a circumstance, in an ongoing narrative. It's a philosophical proposition, but you can only support it as fiction. People wouldn't read philosophical romances if they didn't have some other kind of quality. I just wanted to write fictions where I could make the rules and have what I wanted and also get them published. I had to think of some way to cast these things in terms shared by readers. I think they're good, very challenging limitations. SF is a shared universe of rhetoric. I have been peripheral to it. I like rhetorical devices, to see what can be done with them, especially how you can, without changing their assumptions, make them come out more affectingly so they touch people in new ways." - CNB

"A lot of people are very irritated by [a] kind of self-reference, and I am too. You're engaged on a primary level with the events. Everything else is extra. If you don't engage on a primary level, if the primary level is a level of self-reference than it's repellent. I think that there is a movement in literature that is, maybe call it post-post-modernism, but maybe it's just post-modernism which is a sense that there is a duty to entertain, that fiction is stories, that there is a certain fascination (so you might call it magic realism, or something like that), a certain fascination that literature has to have in order to do anything. Way early on I figured out that maybe the distinction was that modern literature contains symbols, whereas this kind of literature that I'm talking about is symbolic, doesn't contain symbols, but is a symbol. It is itself a quest or a journey or one of those kinds of magic or ritual forms, religious, basically religious forms, so it has an inherent fascination. In itself, the whole thing has a fascination. There's something about accessibility and the inherent fascination of tale-telling. Those kinds of things that I think of as being a new motion in literature. You don't drop all those investigations as to what literature can do and how it refers to itself and all that kind of stuff that makes its own genre. You just say, alright, how can we make it interesting? What would make an interesting realistic painting, now that we've gone through abstraction? Well there's magic realism and there's super realism and there's photo realism. There's all these different ways of finding a way to paint the real world, recognizably, entertainingly, engagingly, accessibly, but still modern right now." - EMV

"Reading Joseph Campbell especially has been an enlightenment to me. And then this Northrup Frye book [The Secular Scripture] about certain hidden structures, which are the structures of romance. We don't tell myths very much anymore, but the occasional science fiction novel will slide into myth. And romance does too. It can't really hurt to know how stories are told and what the functions of stories are, what stories really mean. How we are all, like it or not, in a story. You can't get out of being in story. Which is also a joke about literature, too. When you're reading a story, of course you can't get out of a story, these people are in a book. I think a book has a certain shape, and that the characters are defined by the shape of the book. They're in between covers of a book." - EMV

"In my novels the reader ought to be clued that the story is about a Story. When you read you ought to be able to say 'Wait a minute. This is a book I have in my hand. I am being told about the nature of the book I have in my hand."- TMD

"Every book has a writer, no matter how impersonal what's going on is. There is a writer. You know that someone is telling you this Story. It is all an illusion, though, and all you [the writer] have to do is create the effect that you know what all this is about, and that's all that matters really." - EMV

"I think that very work of assembling an illusion suggests that the reader every once in a while tilt his head at a certain angle and see - 'Oh, its all pretend; the flats stop just past over there and the painting kind of runs out; it's not complete, there's someone back there shifting the scenes. Who is it? OH, I bet I know: his names on the cover.' It is an artifice, but a successful artifice will reflect the poignancy of my attempt at creating it, and of the character's efforts to comprehend the constructs - like Smoky trying to figure out what the Story is he is involved in, or Rush trying to find his own Story or Pierce the secret history of the world. I hope that the poignancy of their quests will redound to my storytelling also, and that the readers will not fear that I am creating an artifice for its own sake, simply to play a trick on them, but will feel the poignancy of my need and desire to tell stories and make sense - and their own too, the readers' own desire to have stories told, and to have meaning drawn out of the stories that life presents." - GF

"If you want a common theme in all the books it's the sense of secret societies and secret religions. People who have a perception of a secret about the universe, which they almost can't express. And other people gather around them to find out what the secret is, and the secret works itself out in surprising ways, in common ordinary life. And it turns out in the end, in fact, to be no secret at all, or to be our common heritage." - EMV

"If you've got this form where anything can happen, in which anything is possible, why do the same things always happen and why are the stories all so alike? Harold Bloom of course tends toward a Freudian explanation about fear of breaking out and obsessions and such, which is reasonable enough. But it also sets the writer a task: How do I make it not come out the same as it always does, yet make it satisfactory as a story? That's my quest. You can come to the same old conclusions. What's important is the effort you make and risks you take as a writer, what it costs you to affirm the same old conclusions." - RG

"The motive force of a book, I think, arises in the writer, not out of the subject matter. If you have an unhappy love affair, you won't necessarily write a book about an unhappy love affair, but whatever it is in you that causes you to have unhappy love affairs, and the pain and harm it does to you, is going to inform whatever book you do write. If you write a book that is going to take ten years, though, that motive force might not last you through. But others will come up. So you hope." - GF

"Somebody once said that a writer's whole store of what he writes out of is fixed by the time he's fourteen. And I think in a certain sense that's true. I think the notions I write about, as opposed to the colour and flavour, came a little later. The flavour and colour really do - really are in a certain sense fixed at fourteen, I think. And the trick is really to get in touch with those things that were going on with you when you were fourteen. So I'm just resurrecting them as an adult, because it's the passage around puberty, just as you enter into puberty, where the whole world opens up suddenly, and everything is imbued with feeling. That's when everything gets fixed, I think, with a certain sense." - EMV

"As we get older, it's almost impossible to avoid the feeling that the world is getting older with us. When we're young, the world is young. There's a phase in which we're attuned to the world and the exciting, revolutionary developments that happen coincide with our own youthfulness and vigour and desire to change and understand the world doesn't have to be the way it is - I can make my own destiny. And if you feel that way in your won life, you're going to see that in the world…You have to make up for the lessening of that craving as you get older, to make up for it with what you know about craft and cunning, pull out a lot of stops that you maybe don't entirely feel anymore." - CNB

"My life (as that of most writers) is uneventful and sedentary. A distillation of its important occasions will be found (disguised or reinvented) in my books; and as I am a writer, my opinions on other subjects are (or should be) without interest." - MJL

"I sit around and think an awful lot before I write. Well, I write longhand. Smoky's italics are my own. That happened around 1967, also, when I got tired of my own handwriting and decided to learn all over again. And when it's all done in longhand, or at least mostly done, I'll start typing it and make some changes as it's being typed." - EMV

"I don't usually write drafts. I may write slowly, but once I have decided what to set down I rarely rewrite much." - GF