
Culled from pages 114-115 in “The Paris Review Interviews: vol. 2“, I love the following snippet that tells of how Isaac Bashevis Singer thinks future technology will enable rather than disable the writer.
INTERVIEWER
Some commentators on the current scene, notably Marshall McLuhan, feel that literature as we have known it for hundreds of years is an anachronism, that it’s on the way out. The reading of stories and novels, they feel, is soon to be a thing of the past, because of electronic entertainments, radio, television, film, stereophonic records, magnetic tapes, and other mechanical means of communication yet to be invented. Do you believe this to be true?
SINGER
It will be true if our writers will not be good writers. But if we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers. I don’t think that human nature is going to change to such a degree that people will stop being interested in a work of imagination. Certainly, the true facts, the real facts, are always interesting. Today nonfiction plays a very big part—to hear stories about what happened. If people jet to the moon, journalists will tell us, or films will tell us, what happened there, and these will be more interesting stories than anything a fiction writer can produce. But still there will be a place for the good fiction writer. There is no machine and no kind of reporting and no kind of film that can do what a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky or Gogol did. It is true that poetry has suffered a great blow in our times. But not because of television or because of other things, but because poetry itself became bad. If we are going to have numbers of bad novels, and bad novelists imitate each other, what they write will be neither interesting nor understood. Naturally, this may kill the novel, at least for a time. But I don’t think that literature, good literature, has anything to fear from technology. The very opposite. The more technology the more people will be interested in what the human mind can produce without the help of electronics.