Novelist; Nobel laureate in literature
Recorded · The Nobel Prize · 2025
The bitterness. I am very sad if I think of the status of the world now. This is my deepest inspiration.
Professional practice
Artists & performers
Risk, audience, repetition, rejection, livelihood, influence, finishing, and how making changes the maker.
12 questions, 234 answers on the record, from 218 members. Every question is asked in FLAPSS wording — nobody answers as anybody else.
Worth reading
Do you rely more on inspiration or discipline to make your work?
Novelist, poet and critic; twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2004
Right. It saves you from giving up. This present novel that will be out — Villages — I several times thought it might be a bad idea and kind of abandoned it.
Novelist, essayist and playwright
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2006
It’s best to start writing when you wake up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever it is you wake up.
Every question in this questionnaire
- What must be repeated until it becomes free rather than mechanical? —
- Do you rely more on inspiration or discipline to make your work? 27
- Which creative risk taught you the most, whether or not the work succeeded? —
- When should an artist listen to an audience, and when should the audience be ignored? —
- How do you tell when a piece of work is done? 67
- What are you best at that nobody watching would notice? 26
- Which rejection changed your work or your direction? —
- What do you do when you feel creatively stuck? 63
- How do money and the need to earn a living shape the work you make? —
- Which writers or artists have most influenced your work? 42
- Whose work makes you envious? 9
- How has making the work changed the person who makes it? —
Who has answered
Members with enough answers in this questionnaire to be worth arriving at — listed A–Z, not ranked by count.
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AS
2 answers
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AFAthol Fugard
Playwright, director and actor
2 answers South Africa 1932–2025
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CLCatherine Lacey
English actress
2 answers United Kingdom / United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland 1904–1979
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Charles H. TownesPhysicist; Nobel laureate in physics for the invention of the maser and laser
2 answers United States 1915–2015
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Curtis Sittenfeldwriter
2 answers United States b. 1975
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FGFrank O. Gehry
Architect; winner of the 1989 Pritzker Prize
2 answers Canada 1929–2025
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Gore VidalNovelist, essayist and playwright
2 answers United States 1925–2012
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Kazuo IshiguroNovelist and screenwriter; Nobel laureate in Literature, 2017
2 answers United Kingdom b. 1954
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MHMarya Hornbacher
American journalist and author
2 answers United States b. 1974
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NKNina Katchadourian
American interdisciplinary artist and educator
2 answers United States b. 1968
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Orhan PamukNovelist; Nobel laureate in Literature, 2006
2 answers Turkey b. 1952
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RFRichard Feynman
Theoretical physicist; Nobel laureate in Physics, 1965
2 answers United States 1918–1988
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