I think it’s good for artists to have this kind of humility in mind. It’s good for you to realize you’re not immortal. You’re part of society. You might be forgotten. Delusions of grandeur probably make work easier—but it makes your work deeper if you admit you’re not so special. It made writing more difficult for me to be grounded, but on the other hand, I think my writing became more substantial when I realized I am no better than anyone else.

But it can be hard to come to this conclusion, especially for young people. There’s so much vanity in literature and all the arts. You see this all the time—take Hemingway, for example, who played the big-game hunter. This whole bullshit about hunting and bullfighting and fishing: That was just the image he wanted us to have of him. Maybe it helped him to feel that way. But it’s not a very mature thing to do. It does not help us understand the work at all—in fact, I think that kind of posturing ruins the work for some people. You can always read the books, in any case, and the persona recedes to the background. When you read Hemingway’s books, it’s there on the page: He wasn’t just the strong guy. He was a hardworking, serious artist, who felt things very deeply.

You can’t just blame the artist, though: We half expect our cultural figures to be these larger-than-life, romantic archetypes. We don’t need them to be, but we want them to be. People want artists to be vain—it probably serves their own vanity, in a way. As long as you’re honest in your texts, it doesn’t do any major harm—but it’s still quite infantile. I think it’s best for writers to strive to be mature, as much as they can, in their life and work.

I think this authorial tendency to self-dramatize can be seen inside some works, too—so many writers seem to need to pump their stories full of sound and fury. I think, instead, of Perec—and the amazing maturity he displays by not reaching for the big, dramatic moment. There tends to be so much drama in writing—too much, in my opinion. I’m just now reading a collection of short stories, and in every short story there’s a suicide or a murder or a rape. Many writers feel that they have to put all this drama in their books in order for us to feel something. Drama is always too easy, in a way. It’s easier just to bring the big drama into things. Especially with young authors, you see so many texts that are just so filled with stuff: You think, get rid of all this! You don’t need that. The young woman I was telling you about, she’s a very good writer. But the book would be much better with fewer deaths. She seems to rely on them, but she doesn’t need them.

To me, though, it’s much more interesting to deal with everyday life, with novelty, with days going by and nothing changing. It’s more difficult, but it’s more interesting—because that’s what most of our lives are. Ninety-nine percent of our days are like the day before. It’s very seldom that we kill ourselves, that we are raped, or killed—luckily. For me, the interesting thing is to deal with that head-on: How do we live when nothing is changing? How do we deal with small things?