Do you think it is also the responsibility of fiction writers to help illuminate true stories from the past?

Q : : In some countries, the history taught in school lessons is sometimes a different narrative to what really happened. Historians can shed light on the true stories that governments tried to erase. However, do you think it is also the responsibility of fiction writers to help illuminate true stories from the past?

Han Kang : In my case, my strongest motivation to write Human Acts came more from my interior. I had to search my interior to grasp the reason why I had been striving to embrace the human experience. Then I encountered Gwangju, the incident which had sealed the most important and painful riddles in my life. I learnt about the brutality and sublimity of human nature.

However, I have to say there was another motivation. In 2009, in the Yongsan district of Seoul, there was a protestors’ sit-in on the roof of a building, which was planned to be demolished without adequate compensation for the tenants.  The government exerted a disproportionate use of force to break up the protest. A fire broke out that claimed the lives of five protestors and one police officer. I saw the burning building on the news, and thought of Gwangju. I felt that Gwangju had returned to us wearing a different face, no longer a proper noun but a common noun; that we had unwittingly been living inside Gwangju all this time.

Source :  https://www.bananawriters.com/hankanginterview

Hunter S Thompson: “You don’t exist unless you’re on TV. Yeah, it’s a validation process”

MH: The Internet has been touted as a new mode of journalism — some even go so far as to say it might democratize journalism. Do you see a future for the Internet as a journalistic medium?

HST: Well, I don’t know. There is a line somewhere between democratizing journalism and every man a journalist. You can’t really believe what you read in the papers anyway, but there is at least some spectrum of reliability. Maybe it’s becoming like the TV talk shows or the tabloids where anything’s acceptable as long as it’s interesting. 

I believe that the major operating ethic in American society right now, the most universal want and need is to be on TV. I’ve been on TV. I could be on TV all the time if I wanted to. But most people will never get on TV. It has to be a real breakthrough for them. And trouble is, people will do almost anything to get on it. You know, confess to crimes they haven’t committed. You don’t exist unless you’re on TV. Yeah, it’s a validation process. Faulkner said that American troops wrote “Kilroy was here” on the walls of Europe in World War II in order to prove that somebody had been there — “I was here” — and that the whole history of man is just an effort by people, writers, to just write your name on the great wall. 

You can get on [the Internet] and all of a sudden you can write a story about me, or you can put it on top of my name. You can have your picture on there too. I don’t know the percentage of the Internet that’s valid, do you? Jesus, it’s scary. I don’t surf the Internet. I did for a while. I thought I’d have a little fun and learn something. I have an e-mail address. No one knows it. But I wouldn’t check it anyway, because it’s just too fucking much. You know, it’s the volume. The Internet is probably the first wave of people who have figured out a different way to catch up with TV — if you can’t be on TV, well at least you can reach 45 million people [on the Internet].

source: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/graffiti/hunter.htm

“If you’re a writer, you’re sort of spending your life trying to figure things out”- Alice Munro

I think that’s particularly true probably of early childhood memories. And there’s always an attempt being made to work through them. But what does “work through” mean? It means that they don’t hurt anymore? That you’ve thought them through and have what you think is a fair idea of what was going on? But you never write about that. You have children. When they write their story of their childhood, it’s still going to be just their story, and the “you” in it is going to be a “you” that you maybe wouldn’t recognize. And this is why I think you have to acknowledge that the story that makes the most honorable effort is still not going to get at everybody’s truth. But the effort is worthy.

If you’re a writer, you’re sort of spending your life trying to figure things out, and you put your figurings on paper, and other people read them. It’s a very odd thing, really. 

You do this your whole life, and yet you know that you fail. You don’t fail all the way, or anything, it’s still worth doing—I think it’s worth doing, anyway. But it’s like this coming to grips with things that you can only partially deal with. 

This sounds very hopeless. I don’t feel hopeless at all. 

source- https://www.vqronline.org/vqr-portfolio/interview-alice-munro

Naval Ravikant: “I think worldly success actually hurts”

Q : “Do you feel an urge to know your inner self fully, and has your worldly success satisfied this urge?” 

Naval: I would say, “Yeah, I absolutely do have an urge to know my inner self fully.” If anything, my worldly success has taken me farther away from that urge. The more worldly success you have, the more your ego gets built up. The more fearful you might be of losing it all. The more fearful my might be about what other people think. The more you have to lose. The more you get caught up in this dream of who you think you are. I think worldly success actually hurts.

If from a young age, you know that you want to know yourself and discover yourself much better, if have that foresight or insight at an early age, material success will actually take you away from it. I’m not Christian, but there is that famous line in the Bible that Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.” I think I understand what he means.

Asghar Farhadi: “nostalgia and the longing for the past is something that maybe sometimes prevents us from moving on”

It’s also about how things do and don’t change with time, and how the past is always present, which is a theme in a lot of your films.

Farhadi: Yes, this is a personal question, something that’s haunting me. The older I get, the more I’m haunted by it—this relationship that we have with our past. A friend in Spain told me this Cuban saying: “We don’t remember what past we had, or what past is awaiting us.” That’s something that I think is very true. In my culture, in Iranian culture, the past is very predominant, maybe I should say unfortunately, because nostalgia and the longing for the past is something that maybe sometimes prevents us from moving on.

Source : https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/interview-asghar-farhadi-on-everybody-knows-and-the-persistence-of-the-past/

Alain Badiou :”A true life does not limit itself either to obedience or the satisfaction of immediate impulses”

Q: So what is the true life?

Alain Badiou :  A life that does not limit itself either to obedience or the satisfaction of immediate impulses. A life in which the subject constitutes herself as a subject. For me there are four domains in which truth manifests itself, what I call the four procedures for the construction of truth: art, love, politics and science. My wish for the youth is that they traverse these four conditions: to encounter art in all its forms; to be loving in fidelity, and for a long time; and to participate in the political reconstruction of a world of justice, as against the world such as it is. And not to be as ignorant of science as they currently are, so that they do not leave it in the hands of technology or capital.

Source : https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2826-corrupting-the-youth-a-conversation-with-alain-badiou

Connie Zweig:”our shadow hides outside the boundaries of our awareness”

London: I would imagine that many of us are unaware of our shadows and only encounter them through other people, in the form of projections.

Zweig: That’s right. By definition, the nature of the shadow is to hide. It hides outside the boundaries of awareness. Then it erupts spontaneously. It may erupt in an addiction, for example. But if it erupts in a projection, as you mentioned, you may have the experience of walking into a party, seeing a perfect stranger, and saying to yourself, “I can’t stand that woman! How could she behave that way?” That is your shadow speaking. There is a message there from a hidden part of yourself. There is information about your own psyche in that moment which, if you don’t begin to explore it, is like a letter that has been left unopened — you lose the message there. But if you begin to do shadow work and ask yourself, “What is it about that person I can’t stand, that is so unacceptable to me?” you will get the message.

Source : https://scott.london/interviews/zweig.html 

Briana Wiest: “Once you see how powerful you really are, you won’t be able to unsee it”

You also talk about how we can control our perceptions/experiences through the power of our minds, which I strongly believe as well. Can you elaborate on this and how you came to believe this?

Wiest: Yes. This is huge. This is everything, really. This was the foundation of it all. Changing the way I think about the world, and myself, and my role and my self-efficacy completely changed my life. The way that I think informs the way I behave. The combination of those things creates most of my experience in the world. I needed solution-based thinking, not problem-based thinking, to understand unconscious biases that were affirming my fears, or making me think everyone is thinking about me, and judging me. I needed to understand that change and peace were possible. Until I could conceive of what that would look like for my life, it remained an impossibility. It will change everything, and more quickly than you think. Try it, just a little bit. Once you see how powerful you really are, you won’t be able to unsee it.

Source : https://themiddleedit.com/brianna-wiest-interview/

Sam Keen:”The first questions we must ask ourselves are “What’s my life about?”

London: In Hymns to an Unknown God, you ask: “Is it possible in this chaotic day and age to have a sense of the sacred in everyday life, or do we have to check our spirits and our god at the workplace door?” Much of what we call spirituality today takes place on Sundays, after work, when the kids are in bed, or when we’re off meditating on our own. Is it possible to make it an integral part of everyday life?

Keen: I think there is a deep yearning today to figure out how to make a real connection with the sacred. I hear many men say, “I have a good job and make a living, but it doesn’t mean anything to me; I want something with meaning, something I have a reason for doing.” But our society has been eaten up by the economic view of things, which routinely forces us to work at jobs that don’t mean anything. I think we’re inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major part of our energy and attention on something that doesn’t give us meaning, only material things.

We have to return, I think, to the difficult idea of right livelihood, which Buddhists talk about, or the Christian idea of vocation. The first questions we must ask ourselves are “What’s my life about?” and “What gives me meaning?” Only after that should we ask “How do I make a living?” and “How do I provide for myself?”

Source : https://scott.london/interviews/keen.html

Milan Kundera:”A nation which loses awareness of its past gradually loses its self”

PR: What is so characteristic of your prose is the constant confrontation of the private and the public. But not in the sense that private stories take place against a political backdrop, nor that political events encroach on private lives. Rather, you continually show that political events are governed by the same laws as private happenings, so that your prose is a kind of psychoanalysis of politics.

MK: The metaphysics of man is the same in the private sphere as in the public one. Take the other theme of the book, forgetting. This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of the self. But what is this self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life. This is the problem of my heroine, in desperately trying to preserve the vanishing memories of her beloved dead husband. But forgetting is also the great problem of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of organized forgetting . This is what is currently happening in Bohemia. Contemporary Czech literature, insofar as it has any value at all, has not been printed for 12 years; 200 Czech writers have been proscribed, including the dead Franz Kafka; 145 Czech historians have been dismissed from their posts, history has been rewritten, monuments demolished. A nation which loses awareness of its past gradually loses its self. And so the political situation has brutally illuminated the ordinary metaphysical problem of forgetting that we face all the time, every day, without paying any attention. Politics unmasks the metaphysics of private life, private life unmasks the metaphysics of politics.

Source : http://www.kundera.de/english/Info-Point/Interview_Roth/interview_roth.html