Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director · The Frick Collection
I firmly believe that the arts should be a part of everybody's education. It's not just learning the history of art, but it's about opening up creativity as a means that can be useful to somebody throughout one's life.
Interview Highlights
I've always, pretty much from the beginning, I've always wanted to write as if I were paying by the word to be published. So that's always gone in there. Whether it's film or television, whether it's comics, whether it's novels, and especially short stories. I want everything to count. I want every word to count.
Novelist and Essayist
The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.
The artificial beginning is interesting to me. There is a clear-cut: old life, that's old country, and here's there's new life, new country. It is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there's always that ambivalence––Where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.
In a way, I sometimes think that it’s when the divergences from what really happened are quite small that it calls for the services of a very scrupulous and clever biographer. Certainly the stuff you get about me from my books it’s not–how can I put it?–it’s not reliable as evidence in any court of law. I’m very conscious that I’m not under oath when I’m writing.
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
