Here’s an interview I did with Sophie Overett for the Queensland Writers Centre.

“Is my work autobiographical? In a sense, how could it not be? Every work, including the epic, is in some way autobiographical. In the Iliad we consider the destiny of two alliances, of a city, of two armies, but we also consider the destiny of Achilles and Priam and Hector, and all these characters, these individual voices, reflect the voice, the solitude, of the author.”

— Roberto Bolaño, interview in Bomb, Winter 2002.

After the launch of The Sleepers Almanac No. 9 at Bella Union earlier this year, I had a drink with the Sleepers Publishing team in the pub across the road. As a person who specialises in asking strange questions, I asked Lou and Zoe whether all writers are strange people. They said that many are, but […]

“The lawyer pushed up his sleeves. Through an opening of his robe, he vigorously scratched his chest. It sounded like someone currying a horse. He placed his magistral cap on the head of a shiny banister beside him and started his counsel’s speech.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “we will disregard the motive of the murder, the circumstances in which it was committed, and the murder itself. Under these conditions, with what do you accuse my client?”

The jury, struck by a side of the case they hadn’t considered, was silent and rather uneasy. The judge slept, and the public prosecutor was sold to the Germans.”

— Boris Vian, ‘Fog’, Blues for a Black Cat, transl. Julia Older, The University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1992, p. 80.

“I think society is one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have. I rather think that Duchamp concurred with this view. When I was young and needed help, society wouldn’t give it, because it had no confidence in what I was doing. But when, through my perseverance, society took an interest, then it wanted me not to do the next thing, but to repeat what I had done before. At every point society acts to keep you from doing what you have to do.”

— John Cage

From an interview published in: Moira Roth, Difference/Indifference: musings on postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V., Amsterdam, 1998, p. 72.