ABSTRACT
When the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk first read the American novelist William Faulkner’s Paris Review interview, he felt as if he had chanced upon a sacred text. Reading such interviews offered Pamuk relief from the isolation of his own writing table, confined by ‘the smell of paper and pen in a lonely room’ (2007, p. viii). It also put him in dialogue with a confederacy of writers from whom he could glean insights, encouragement and more. An avid reader of the literary interview, Pamuk suspects he came to write in longhand on graph paper not only because it suits his way of working, but also because, as he had learned from interviews, it was the writing method of both Thomas Mann and Jean Paul Sartre. Yet, for Pamuk, writer interviews are not just catalogued fetishes and bugbears, they engage with what he calls fragile moments, and the ways in which writers overcome difficulty and adversity, the sort of writing talk that illuminates craft, vocation and superstition, adding intellectual and spiritual quest, unravelling and hand-dirtying any lingering myths of unsullied genius and inspiration. In that way interviews are a vital source of artistic and cultural knowledge.
