Lore Segal: I imagine witches to be people who sit around like my witt...

Story has a mind of its own and tells things sometimes it might have preferred us not to know. Stories operate like dreams; both veil what is to be uncovered, neither is capable of the coverup.

Lore Segal

mind dream sometimes

My idea in Half the Kingdom was simply, or not so simply perhaps, that medical science has given us twenty extra years of life. Those twenty extra years - one is grateful for them, one is happy, but they also give you ten or twenty years more of losing your faculties. That is actually the origin of my notion. Once you live longer than you're supposed to live, things go dreadfully wrong. But nevertheless, you're not dead.

Lore Segal

medical grateful giving

Gustave Flaubert said, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi." It is not possible to write something you are not, but to have a new form, with a different hair color and a new body ... I do very little of that. That's why I keep bringing up the same people. I haven't given myself a hard time about it. But I can't make six new characters instead of one.

Lore Segal

hard-times writing character

Franz Kafka is a huge influence, more than the Grimms. To allow yourself to get into the coal bucket and fly to the sky ... we learned that from Kafka, that you can have a thought and make a body of it in this way.

Lore Segal

influence

I don't go to the movies because they scare me. I don't like anything that is suspenseful, even pleasantly so.

Lore Segal

scare

I'm bad at thinking about society. I love to make fun of very small aspects. For instance the privacy rules we have in the States. Where you sign this thing that you've never read, and if you ever read it you discover there's no privacy whatsoever. But I don't know how to think sociologically, to tell you the truth. My son is a political scientist and my daughter-in-law is a sociologist. I can't think that way. I am not a good political militant at all. I keep thinking about what the other side must look like.

Lore Segal

fun son thinking

I've often tried to describe how memory works. I've suggested this to students, and told them to close their eyes and try to remember what I look like. Then I ask them if they remember what I look like. But when you open your eyes you will be surprised how different what you thought I looked like is to what I actually look like. Because the imagination is a different raw material from actual vision. Memory is very different from the thing itself.

Lore Segal

eye imagination memories

I'm very moved and very excited. And it just seems to me here are houses and trees and streets that feel so different from New York. I feel very attached to London; I love it.

Lore Segal

different house tree

It's hard for us sophisticates to believe, but the people my parents worked for were good people. They were socialists of the heart. They were Scottish upper class. I don't think they had political theories in the way my lefty friends in New York do but they did all the things that socialists do. My mother was the Jewish cook from Vienna and they would say, "Come and have dinner with us." I spent weekends with them. Who does that? This is Utopia.

Lore Segal

mother heart believe

I read on a Kindle. I must be of the opinion that the new way to read is a pretty good way to read. It's a new way. Those of us who like the smell of books get upset but nevertheless this is the way we're going.

Lore Segal

upset opinion book

Did the nineteenth-century novelists create more generously than we do now? In a general reading of contemporary work, do you see a lot of new and different characters, or is it the same character who is a stand-in for the writer? And it's interesting enough, but it's a weakness I think. We are much more self-revealing and less able to produce new people over and over again.

Lore Segal

reading character thinking

I'm not going to say it's laziness, but I'm not a grand creator of new characters.

Lore Segal

laziness character

There seems to me now to be the notion that you send something to a journal or an agent and months go by. It seems to me like that is a new piece of bad manners. Probably. Generally I assume that anything that happens now happened to Adam and Eve also.

Lore Segal

adam-and-eve assuming manners

Once you start on an idea it proliferates in itself.

Lore Segal

There's that wonderful line in Measure for Measure. I forget which of the characters has committed adultery and is going to die. He looks at his hand and says, "How could this die?" That's the joke. I've always thought, and this is nothing new, that we don't really believe we die. I think you're going to die, because I know that's what happens but I can't imagine I'm going to die.

Lore Segal

character believe thinking

I dare say you believe I'm going to die. I bet you don't believe you're going to die. You know it, but you don't believe it. Imaginatively, I think we find it impossible to believe we don't exist.

Lore Segal

impossible believe thinking

As soon as you move through the hospital doors you've removed yourself from real life. From the world we know. It's an alien world. Just enter those gates and you are in alien territory.

Lore Segal

real world moving

I did translations of Grimms' Fairy Tales and became very charmed about that way of looking at things. Fairy tales tell a lot of truths. Just as a side point, for instance, we always think the bad guys in fairy tales are the stepmothers, who are witches. But where are the fathers when the witches are killing and mishandling their children? Away. They are on a business trip. They are hunting, they are away. Wow, you know! No one says the fathers are the bad guys! It's one of the things you don't say. But my goodness, where are they?

Lore Segal

father children thinking

I wrote Her First American and I always say it took me eighteen years. It took me that long was because after about five years I stopped and wrote Lucinella. I got stuck; it was too hard to write. Lucinella felt like a lark. I wanted to write about the literary circle because it amused me, and I allowed myself to do what I wanted to do. It's just one of the things I'm allowed to do if I feel like it.

Lore Segal

stuck writing long

I'm always amused by the way questions are asked. "What did you intend?" That's not even a recognizable verb. You don't intend when you write. You sit down and you're thinking things and dreaming things and someone says something and you think "Ah!" That's how it happens. Intention is not part of the game.

Lore Segal

dream writing thinking

I imagine witches to be people who sit around like my witty grandmother, people who are injustice collectors or humiliation collectors. I choose to imagine that's what a witch is. The reason witches are so evil is because they're so unhappy and so hurt.