Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell is an American novelist in the Southern literary tradition. His debut novel, Edisto, was nominated for the American Book Award and was excerpted in The New Yorker. Powell has written five more novels—including A Woman Named Drown, Edisto Revisited, a sequel to his debut, Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men, The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, and You & Me, his most recent—and three collections of short stories. In addition to The New Yorker, Powell's work has appeared in The Paris Review,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 April 1952
CountryUnited States of America
Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications. It used to be only the President had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone. It's a larger anthropological shift in my mind than even the tattoo age in the United States. It used to be the only people who had tattoos were in the navy, in prison, or working at a carnival.
There's a lot of phones; but I'm out of that field. They make me feel like a prisoner of war; there's not going to be any texting for me. The pre-paid phone is the frontier of my technological advance.
Conversations are the most direct way to connect with people.
If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction.
Even if you're the worst writer in the world, at least you'll have the evidence.
I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.
I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.
Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.
Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?
Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting,
I've had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one's potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.
Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would?