Viet Thanh Nguyen
speaker
1,011 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 7 May
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He barely got any literary prizes when he was writing.
And people totally misunderstand James Baldwin.
They don't understand this man fled the United States as a refugee from what he experienced in terms of American racism.
He fled in the 40s.
He fled again in the 70s.
He spent a lot of his life in Turkey and in France.
He exiled himself because of what he saw here, because he spoke the truth.
So these are the kinds of writers I admire.
I don't know what, maybe Baldwin won prizes, but he didn't get them.
And, you know, it's that conviction of trying to use your art to make it the best that it can be because art is about both beauty and truth.
And those two things are inseparable.
I believe that with a passion.
And so that in the end, I hope, is what would drive me more than this aspiration for prizes.
Joy is also a complicated thing.
You can take a pill and it'll give you joy and then it wears off and you feel like garbage after that.
And joy can also be something that you work at and joy can be complicated and multi-layered.
So writing is for me a very joyful experience but it also is very boring in a lot of ways.
You sit in a room by yourself and
and you just sit and you put words on paper and it goes on and on and on, and you realize it never ends.
If you're a writer, it never ends.
Showing 741–760 of 1,011 · page 38 of 51
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