Paul Bowles: Quotations from Interviews

“The man who wrote the books didn’t exist. No writer exists. He exists in his books, and that’s all” (1, p. xii).

“When I write a story I think more or less the same way as if I were writing a poem. It’s quite different from writing a novel” (1, p. 49).

“I can see that a lot of my stories were definitely therapeutic. Maybe they should never have been published, but they were. But they certainly had a therapeutic purpose behind them when I wrote them. For me personally. I needed to clarify an issue for myself, and the only way of doing it was to create a fake psychodrama in which I could be everybody” (1, p. 50).

Bowles: “I didn’t plan The Sheltering Sky at all. I knew it was going to take place in the desert, and that it was going to be basically the story of the professor in “A Distant Episode.” It was an autobiographical novel, a novel of memory, that is.

Q: You mean you identify with the professor?

Bowles: No, not directly…One’s first novel often writes itself: everything comes out in it and it’s generally the best novel that one writes. In that sense it was autobiographical:—the one I’d been hatching for ten or fifteen years without knowing it. And it came out that way” (1, pp. 51-52).

“I got the idea for The Sheltering Sky riding on a Fifth Avenue bus one day going uptown from Tenth Street. I decided which point of view I would take. It would be a work in which the narrator was omniscient. I would write it consciously up to a certain point, and after that let it take its own course…simply writing without any thought of what I had already written, or awareness of what I was writing, or intention as to what I was going to write next, or how it was going to finish. And I did that” (1, p. 88).

“I’m not aware of writing about alienation. If my mind worked that way, I couldn’t write. I don’t have any explicit message…” (1, p. 90).

“The day I find out what I’m all about I’ll stop writing—I’ll stop doing everything. Once you know what makes you tick, you don’t tick any more” (1, p. 93).

“I can only find out after I’ve written, since I empty my mind each time before I start. I only know what I intended to do once it’s finished” (1, p. 101).

Q: …living outside your indigenous culture [Tangier instead of New York] became almost a compulsion with you.

Bowles: Not almost; it was a real compulsion. Even as a small child, I was always eager to get away. I remember when I was six years old, I was sent off to spend two weeks with someone…and I begged to stay longer. I didn’t want to go home again…I didn’t want to see my parents again…” (1, pp. 116-117).

“I’ve never been a thinking person. A lot seems to happen without my conscious knowledge” (1, p. 119).

“…I learned how to write without being conscious of what I was doing. I learned how to make it grammatically correct and even to have a certain style without the slightest Idea of what I was writing. One part of my mind was doing the writing, and God knows what the other part was doing…I don’t know how those things work, and I don’t want to know” (1, p. 120).

“I don’t feel that I wrote these books. I feel as though they had been written by my arm, by my brain, my organism, but that they’re not necessarily mine…I look on it simply as a natural function. As far as I’m concerned it’s fun, and it just happens” (1, p. 122).

“All through my childhood I was writing, and that means from the age of four on” (1, p. 124).

“What is my writing but a constant exploration of possible modes of consciousness? You could almost qualify the entire body of work as a series of variations on the theme of human perception. (That is, if you didn’t mind sounding like a critic.)” (1, p. 138).

“I mean one writes what one writes, one doesn’t decide what to write, one writes what comes out. Whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, poetically so” (1, p. 153).

“…my mother taught me as child to exist with a completely empty mind, not think of anything. She thought it was good for the mind, relaxing you know” (1, p. 154).

“I often have no idea what I’m going to write when I sit down. I never plan ahead of time, so how could I know the motivation? Writing isn’t about an idea. It comes more from a kind of feeling” (1, p. 199).

1. Gena Dagel Caponi (Editor). Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

2. Wikipedia. “Paul Bowles.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bowles 

3. “Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U27N_icl36g