9 Outtakes from James Baldwin's Paris Review interview - Rolf Potts
If you can do anything else with yourself, anything more certain, you owe it to yourself and to everyone you love to do that. But if you can’t, if you need to be writing, well, then, one of the joys of the lonely journey ahead, beta, is the comfort of reading. A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”
Ayad Akhtar • Homeland Elegies: A Barack Obama Favourite Book 2020
What is your advice to aspiring writers?
... See moreLearn to enjoy the process of writing. Don’t think too much about future results, i.e., best-selling books or movie deals or literary acclaim. That may or may not ever come. But if you love the act of writing, and the thrill of exploring ideas and crafting your work, that is the real reward.
Murakami argues that the three most important traits in any writer are talent, focus and endurance. Maybe that’s the right order in inspiration-laden fields like novel writing or composing symphonies, but in most of our vocations, endurance, or stamina, matters most.