It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
Interpretation
Good literature must be rooted in the author's real-life experiences.
Gore Vidal emphasizes the importance of authenticity in literature, suggesting that for a work to be considered truly good, it should reflect the genuine experiences and truths of the author. This notion challenges writers to draw from their own lives, ensuring that their stories resonate with honesty and depth.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of story in writing workshops.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?
There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.
I think a lot of people who want to be musicians terrify their parents because they don't have a living example of it in their families, and I did. So I always knew that it was possible.
Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea.
Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.
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