Love Quote by Alfred Kazin

A critic admitting that talk about craft is really talk about desire is Kazin at his most disarmingly candid. The line punctures the polite fiction that writers discuss their work the way carpenters discuss joints: rationally, professionally, at a safe distance. Kazin insists the distance is a lie. When the writer narrates process, defends choices, name-drops influences, he is also narrating attachment - the irrational pull toward sentences, toward an imagined reader, toward the private world that feels more responsive than the public one.

The phrase "love affair" does double work. It elevates writing from job to intimacy, but it also smuggles in jealousy, embarrassment, and self-deception. Love affairs are selective; they create a reality tunnel. That is the subtext behind the writer's interview patter: the insistence that this book had to be written, that the characters "took over", that the ending was inevitable. Kazin, a critic shaped by the mid-century American literary scene, knew how performance-heavy authorial self-explanation can get - part confession, part sales pitch, part alibi. Calling it a love affair neatly frames the heat behind the rhetoric, without romanticizing it into purity.

Coming from a critic, the remark is also a warning label for readers and interviewers: treat author talk as emotionally true but not necessarily factually reliable. You're listening to someone explain their devotion to a partner who can't talk back: the work itself. And like any affair, it leaves evidence everywhere - in the defensiveness, the tenderness, the craving to be understood on exactly the writer's terms.