I entered psychoanalysis because I felt I was ­becoming intolerable to the people around me. I loved them, and they deserved better. 

November 23, 2010, 7:20 p.m. I’m feeling low. The feeling fades when I write, and that’s why I write, to escape from myself. Even if I write about me. Something happens when my thoughts meet words and sentences, a space opens up, a space beyond any thought or sentence.

You might as well start by confessing your greatest shame. Anything else would just be exposition.

I am cleaning out the storage space that’s ­under the stairs but accessed from outside—a steel door somewhat strangely opening onto the grass. Twenty years of stuff diverted here. Not quite tossed out. You never know. 

Terry Southern’s interview with the English novelist Henry Green (born Henry Yorke) has been an in-house favorite atThe Paris Review ever since it appeared in our nineteenth issue (Summer 1958). If Green was, in Southern’s borrowed description, a “writer’s writer’s writer,” theirs is an interviewer’s interview

There’s this man—a scientist, not a fiction writer—who interests me. Who has interested me for almost five years; who is so odd, so smart, so impossible to understand that I keep sifting through the facts of his life in search of a pattern.

Along with Goethe, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was the most famous German literary figure of the nineteenth century. He was known not for his novels (he didn’t publish any) or his drama (his plays were never much produced) or his thinking (it was ­deliberately unsystematic) but for his lyric ­poetry and for the characteristic wit and irony of his ­reportage and travel writing and polemics. 

There are many kinds of prayer. There is a kind of prayer that’s like breathing. There is a kind of prayer that’s like talking to your best friend all day long. There is a kind of prayer in the face of beauty that lifts your hands up because it would be harder to keep them down. 

For the cover of our sixtieth-anniversary issue, we asked the French artist JR to make a giant poster of George Plimpton’s face and paste it up on a wall in Paris, as a symbolic homecoming and a tribute to the patrie.