To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
“What I’m writing is not in an avant-garde mode, and certainly not in an experimental mode, and certainly not in an ‘alternative’ mode. It comes out of a rival tradition, and it’s much older and much bigger than the tradition of realist fiction, which only started in the 18th Century. Whereas this rival tradition you can trace all the way back to the epics, Ovid, Rabelais, and even at the beginning of the realist tradition, to Laurence Sterne, and Diderot, and so on. This is a tradition that’s beginning, I think, to break loose again.“
Ronald Sukenick