Malzberg's favorite of his
own novels is Underlay, and stories he is the most pleased
to have written are "Heavy Metal" and "The High Purpose."
By Malzberg:
|
| "...I spent the better
part of the decade between the mid-sixties and mid-seventies keeping regular
hours at the typewriter, eating huge meals at ritualized times and telling
myself I would most definitely Change the Face of My Time.
I did not change a damned thing (except the outlines of my own face and then by famishment, not by fiction) and was a fool to think that I ever could...." |
| "...writers are notoriously slow learners and have to live out their visions before they can truly understand them, pace Joyce." |
| "It [the story 'Gehenna'] captures a time, a place, a sadness as does so much of my work...but it does so in resignation rather than outrage which may be a point of difference. I read it over WBAI-FM at 5:30 one morning in April, 1974 and found myself weeping, which may indicate either an extraordinarily strong short-short story or a great deal of a self-pity. Both, I suppose, although perhaps neither. Just an intimation of that greatest of all losses awaiting us which makes all the earlier losses but symbols." |
| "It [the story 'Final War'] came from personal and political motivations and except in the vaguest sense I did not know what the hell I was writing about. This is true of most successful—and for that matter most unsuccesful—art and any writer who tells you differently is either lying or not telling the truth." |
| "...under pressure always go back to your history, a lesson that good pro quarterbacks and cowardly jockeys have both learnt." |
| "It [the story 'Notes Just Prior to the Fall'] strikes me as a pretty shrewd, pretty metaphysical, pretty well-crafted work for a young man whose actual life experiences with the material were those of a floundering fool...but I could make that statement about almost all of my work on any subject. Still can, as a matter of fact. Sorry about that. Writers, I have decided, are the least competent of individuals: they write (and the good ones well) to the degree that they cannot manage their lives outside and please pass the salt and damn that music." |
On Malzberg and his work:
| "There is no one, with
the possible exception of Philip K. Dick, whose works, each one of them,
are so unpredictable or so outrageous or outraged."
|
| "Malzberg will be around
to infuriate long after most of us are homogenized in memory....Dammit,
how can a man be so much fun and have so little joy?"
|
| "Barry Malzberg is
one of the few writers in the world whom I will gladly, happily, loudly
declare is a better writer than I am."
|
| "One of the finest
practitioners of science fiction today."
|
| On The Cross of
Fire:
"It's a novel that turns the reader everywhichway—invetive, funny, intriguing. The idea of a person getting therapy by taking the place of Jesus in the Bible—with all the conflicts of a modern man overlaid on the past—is quintessential Malzberg, brilliant and thought-provoking. I enjoyed the hell out of it." |
| "Throughout, Malzberg's
prose—perhaps the finest in science fiction—weaves a state of lyric darkness...This
promises to be the science fiction of the year."
|
| On Beyond Apollo:
"Horrid ironies, veins of gold...a beautiful and heart-breaking book." |
| On Herovit's World:
"Read the book and do your own guessing. This Malzberg is clever....I enjoyed it hugely." |