fiction

Now that that organism has, for good or ill, its own self-sufficient equilibrium, why should I entrust myself to the media? Why continue to mix its breath with mine? I have a well-founded fear that the media, which, because of its current nature, that is, lacking a true vocation for "public interest," would be inclined, carelessly, to restore a private quality to an object that originated precisely to give a less circumscribed meaning to individual experience.

the universal needs the singular, and the singular must contain the universal. If you can put yourself in it, the labels fall away and it becomes art.

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Style is not merely decorative or ornamental, any more than are feathers on a bird. Style performs work. Whatever its loveliness or ostentation, it is what allows the creature to fly, to attract mates, to hide from predators, to be what it is. Those feathers, moreover, are only as good as the wings they fit to, and the beak and claws to which they are indirectly joined, and all the rest. The parts have to connect; they have to work as a whole. Getting them together is what makes good writing.

For me, writing is a way of struggling through the intricacies of an anti-empirical sensibility. And there must be words other than fiction and nonfiction. I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world.

If I want to write well, I have to work hard at it. I have disciplined myself by clearing other things out of my life that would make me busy. If I was going to fail in being a writer, I didn't want to have any excuses. My excuse was going to be that I had given myself my best shot and I wasn't good enough. It's kind of an imposed desperation.

Matt Caprioli

Matt Caprioli

fiction