" Thornton Wilder: The problem of telling you about my past life as a writer is like that of imaginative narration itself; it lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom. A great deal of writing and talking about the past is unacceptable. It freezes the historical in a determinism. Today’s
writer smugly passes his last judgment and confers on existing attitudes the lifeless aspect of plaster-cast statues in a museum.
He recounts the past as though the characters knew what was going to happen next. "

― Malcolm Cowley , Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series