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I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.
--
'The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo' by Gerald Howard, The Hungry Mind Review, #47 , 1997

 

Don DeLillo

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Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

 

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Of course I'm a black writer.... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

 

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Every writer wants to be believed. But every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

 

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I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.

 

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Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.
I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context.

 

Nadine Gordimer