SOURCE: "The Doing of Fiction," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1993, pp. 23-9.

In the following interview from 1981, conducted in English, Mortley questions Perec about his theories of fiction.

[Perec:] I began writing, I was twenty about. I am now forty-five and I think I learn how to write. I know how to write stories and even poetry and dramas, I could say, and it's my way of living in a sense. I can't imagine a life in which I won't spend some hours every day writing. I can't say exactly why I started writing. I can say now that I am in great familiarity with language and it's a kind of, I could say, struggle. I began with French language and fiction in which I try to do what I told you about the boy child with the alarm clock when I try to undo the letters...