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The Paris Review
The DNA of Literature

Welcome to the DNA of Literature

Welcome to the DNA of literature—over 50 years of literary wisdom rolled up in 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews, now available online—free. Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive that day has finally come. Now, for the first time, you can read, search and download any or all of over three hundred in-depth interviews with poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, critics, musicians, and more, whose work set the compass of twentieth-century writing, and continue to do so into the twenty-first century.

"There is no other archive quite like The Paris Review interviews. The National Endowment for the Arts could not be more pleased or more proud than to make this resource available free to the American public."
—Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

Release dates for The DNA of Literature PDFs:

1950s: Online Now
1960s: January 10, 2005
1970s: February 14, 2005
1980s: April 4, 2005
1990s: May 16, 2005
2000s: July 1, 2005


TRUMAN CAPOTE
1957

On his childhood: “I was thought somewhat eccentric, which was fair enough, and stupid, which I suitably resented . . . ”




ISAK DINESEN
1956

“I'd say [to the African villagers] ‘Once there was a man who had an elephant with two heads. . .’ and at once they were eager to hear more. ‘Oh? Yes, but Mem-Sahib, how did be find it, and how did he manage to feed it?’”




RALPH ELLISON
1955

“[African-American folklore] is like jazz; there's no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it.”



WILLIAM FAULKNER
1956

“The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”



FRANCOIS MAURIAC
1953

“Sartre expressed the despair of this generation. He did not create it, but he gave it a justification and a style.”




DOROTHY PARKER
1956

“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, ‘You're all a lost generation.’ That got around to certain people and we all said, ‘Whee! We're lost.’”


FRANCOISE SAGAN
1956

“I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.”

Irwin Shaw
IRWIN SHAW
1953

On the New York theater audience: “I have a fine play in mind I'll write for them someday. The curtain slides up on a stage bare except for a machine gun facing the audience. . . . [then] the actor walks upstage, adjusts the machine gun, and blasts them.”



GEORGES SIMENON
1955

“The fact [is] that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people . . . ”



JAMES THURBER
1955

“When I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and . . . there she was stuck up there, naked, on a bookcase."