My highlights from his Paris Review interview
I: Do you have a reader in mind when you write?
B: No, you can't have that.
I: So it's quite unlike preaching?
B: Entirely. The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you're talking about. When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out something you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
B: For me it's like a journey, and the only thing you know that if when the book is over, you are prepared to continue — you haven't cheated.
I: What would be cheating?
B: Avoiding. Lying.
B: An essay is not simpler, though it may seem so. An essay is essentially an argument. The writer's point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something. In a novel or a play you're trying to show them something. The risks, in any case, are exactly the same.
I: What are your first drafts like?
B: They are overwritten. Most of the rewrite, then, is cleaning. Don't describe it, show it. That's what I try to teach all young writers —take it out! Don't describe a purple sunset, make me see that it is purple.
I: As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with knowledge?
B: You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all disguises, some of which you didn't know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
B: Europe is no longer a frame of reference, a standard-bearer, the classic model for literature and for civilization. It's not the measuring stick. There are other standards in the world. It's a fascinating time to be living. There's a whole wide world which isn't now as it was when I was younger. When I was a kid the world was white, for all intents and purposes, and now its struggling to remain white —a very different thing.
B: Well, I refuse to. Perhaps the turning point in one's life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily become one.
I: Are you suggesting they are less concerned, somehow, with social injustice?
B: No, no, you see, I don't want to make that kind of dichotomy. I'm not asking that anybody get on picket lines or take positions. That is entirely a private matter. What I'm saying has to do with the concept of the self, and the nature of self-indulgence which seems to me to be terribly strangling, and so limited it finally becomes sterile.
I: You seem very troubled —but not by death?
B: Yes, true, but not at all by death. I'm troubled over getting my work done and over all the things I've not earned. It's useless to be troubled by death, because then, of course, you can't live at all.
I: What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate question: How do I become a writer?
B: Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say that will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
I: Can you discern talent within someone?
B: Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
I: How does it strike you that in many circles James Baldwin is known as a prophetic writer?
B: I don't try to be prophetic, as I don't sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, "I don't look like that." And Picasso replied, "You will." And he was right.