In addition to the Ray Bradbury interview I already told you about, the Spring 2010 issue of The Paris Review also contains an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction writer John McPhee.

Over the course of his lengthy interview, McPhee, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, offered up two anecdotes I particularly liked.

First came one that shines a spotlight on the choices those of us who are both writers and editors must make:

Bingham had been a writer-reporter at The Reporter magazine. So he comes to work at The New Yorker, to be a fact editor. Within the first two years there, he goes out to lunch with his old high-school friend Gore Vidal. And Gore says, What are you doing as an editor, Bobby? What happened to Bob Bingham the writer? And Bingham says, Well, I decided that I would rather be a first-rate editor than a second-rate writer. And Gore Vidal draws himself up and says, And what is wrong with a second-rate writer?

Not at all a retort I would have expected out of Gore Vidal, whose ego seemed such that I’m surprised the phrase “second-rate” was in his vocabulary.

Then came an interesting metaphor relating to style over content, and polish over substance:

I got my thirty thousand words done, and then I finished the thing over Christmas. It has a really good structure and was technically fine. But it had no life in it at all. One person wrote a note on it that said, You demonstrated you know how to saddle a horse. Now go find the horse.

You’ll have to excuse me now. I think I’d better go find a horse.