DNA of Literature

"...as far as the brain goes, I’m fine. I’ve just finished another novel, in fact. I’ve got a wonderful title for it, Bachelors Anonymous. Don’t you think that’s good? Yes, everybody likes that title...I don’t want to be like Bernard Shaw. He turned out some awfully bad stuff in his nineties. He said he knew the stuff was bad but he couldn’t stop writing…I will the day off at seven-thirty. I do my daily dozen exercises, have breakfast, and then go into my study…Before I start a book I’ve usually got four hundred pages of notes. Most of them are almost incoherent...Well, I’ve slowed up a good deal now. I used to write about two thousand words [per day]. Now I suppose I do about one thousand."

– P.G. Wodehouse, on being a ninety-one and a half year old writer.

The Paris Review is making available for download more than 300 interviews with “poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, critics, musicians, and more” conducted over the past 50 years as part of its DNA of Literature archive, including interviews with great talents such as Vladimir Nabokov, P.G Wodehouse (quoted above), Borges, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as interviews with psueds such as Maya Angelou and Arthur Miller.