“I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites.”

— Kenzaburō Ōe

Paris Review interview (2007)
Context: I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything. If you look at one of my manuscripts, you can see I make many changes. So one of my main literary methods is “repetition with difference.” I begin a new work by first attempting a new approach toward a work that I’ve already written — I try to fight the same opponent one more time. Then I take the resulting draft and continue to elaborate upon it, and as I do so the traces of the old work disappear. I consider my literary work to be a totality of differences within repetition.
I used to say that this elaboration was the most important thing for a novelist to learn.

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Kenzaburō Ōe43

Japanese author 1935

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“I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites.”

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