SOURCE: Butor, Michel, and Martine Reid. “Bricolage: An Interview with Michel Butor.¹” Yale French Studies, no. 84 (1994): 17–26.

In the following interview, Butor discusses the compartmentalization of the arts and his writing process.

[Reid]: If I have been eager to interview you and to place this interview as the lead piece of a journal issue devoted to writing and drawing, to the readable and the visible, it is because it seems to me that among contemporary writers, you are the one of those who has most clearly striven to prove the double affirmation which you yourself have formulated: “Painting is also something we read … literature is also something we look at.”² A similar remark opens a text which you published in 1969, Les Mots dans la peinture. On the subject of words which hold your attention in painting and of which you propose a list (title, signature, address, maxims, rebus, proverbs...