Thursday, May 28, 2009

Five Questions for Walter Kirn « Culturebot:

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

I used to think that work and art were opposed somehow, like marriage and true love, say, but over the years I’ve come to see that keeping work out of your art and vice-a-versa impoverishes both of them. At Oxford I learned that our language’s greatest writers, from Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson, collapsed this distinction, singing for their suppers without apologies.
The notion that mere toil and fine expression are separate activities is mostly propounded by wealthy amateurs.