E. Klimov's 'come And See,' About Partisans

I Take For Granted That For The Imaginative Writer, The Exercise Of The Imagination Is Part Of The Basic Process Of Coping With Reality, Just As Actors Need To Act All The Time To Make Up For Some Deficiency In Their Sense Of Themselves.

It Was An Excess Of Fantasy That Killed The Old United States, The Whole Mickey Mouse And Marilyn Thing, The Most Brilliant Technologies Devoted To Trivia Like Instant Cameras And Space Spectaculars That Should Have Stayed In The Pages Of Science Fiction . . . Some Of The Last Presidents Of The U.s.a. Seemed To Have Been Recruited Straight From Disneyland.

If Their Work Is Satisfying People Don't Need Leisure In The Old-fashioned Sense. No One Ever Asks What Newton Or Darwin Did To Relax, Or How Bach Spent His Weekends. At Eden-olympia Work Is The Ultimate Play, And Play The Ultimate Work.

Yes, Sometimes I Think That All My Writing Is Nothing More Than The Compensatory Work Of A Frustrated Painter.

I Don't Think Any Particular Painters Have Inspired Me, Except In A General Sense. It Was More A Matter Of Corroboration. The Visual Arts, From Manet Onwards, Seemed Far More Open To Change And Experiment Than The Novel, Though That's Only Partly The Fault Of The Writers. There's Something About The Novel That Resists Innovation.