Elizabeth Hardwick as a critic was like Elizabeth Hardwick as a hostess: she did the grunt work as gracefully as the glamorous work, slipping in the plot, the theme, and her unlikely brilliant discoveries as if it were as easy as introducing two long-lost friends, in the meantime leaving no glass unwashed, no surface unpolished.

RICHARD PRICE: I write novels because it’s what I do. I’m a novelist. I always consider myself a novelist. And finding my story is like finding love, falling in love. That’s why it takes me forever to find the story I want to write, ’cause it’s a little bit like, OK, I need to be in love.

BLVR: Do you wake up every morning and write right away?

RP: It depends. It depends if there’s anybody waiting for it. If there’s not anybody waiting for it, I can get slack. That’s also the good thing about screenwriting, is that there are other people involved. If you’re writing a novel, once you sign a contract and have a couple years to write it, that’s it. You’re on your own. You can have cobwebs, you can look like Miss Haversham’s wedding cake before anybody gives a shit.

LORRIE MOORE: I’ve been writing seriously for thirty years, and less seriously for more. (The Seventeen story you mentioned above was written thirty years ago.) I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write. My first two books, I know, are full of energy, and there are sentences I still like here and there, but mostly they are chock-full of mistakes of judgment and taste and sensibility. I did not have the skill to take on some of the material I took on, even when the material was fairly stock or meager. But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

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