An Interview with Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand and I visited Denny's Diner late one evening to catch up. After discussing boys, clothes and Sufjan Stevens, I thought it would be helpful if I put on record an insightful conversation encapsulating her worldview. So I asked her a few questions in a serious interview:

KS: Ms. Rand, It is the biggest honor to pretend to interview you, so thanks for humoring my imagination. Let’s just dig right into the hard stuff. In your own words, what is your philosophy?

AR: My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

KS: What is man, in your opinion?

AR: Man is a being of self-made soul.

KS: How do you feel about discrimination between men and women?

AR: I am an anti-feminist. I regard man as a superior value. I am always in favor of tomboys and of intellectual equality, but women don’t interest me.

KS: I really admire the development of your characters. How do you approach characterization?

AR: Characterization was always what I haven given least thought to. I’m always very clear on the concept of the character, but not in the technical sense of how to project the kind of character I have in mind. I’d have to be very clear on what are the major and minor premises and motivation of each character, on what makes him tick, what he is after—and I could state it in words. But I would not project in advance how to show, for instance, that Andrei is brave. I had almost a block against characterization, I was contemptuous of the issue because of the irrational importance given to it by the kind of stories and schools of literature that say characterization is a primary, and there’s detailed character delineations of people who do nothing at all. Throughout the writing, I was astonished that I was keeping to a very great consistency of characterization; apparently, my subconscious premises were set.

KS: How did you begin to develop what you call your “thinking in principles?”

AR: I began to formulate reasons consciously. I began to ask myself the why of the ideas I believed, and to integrate them. Before, I had very strong value-judgments, but they were not very connected. It was a period of wonderfully intense intellectual excitement.

KS: How did Victor Hugo influence your writing?

AR: I began to be conscious of style for the first time. I began to be aware that Hugo has a way of using language that makes the drama of the incidents; a synopsis of the same events wouldn’t be as good. I saw the importance of style as a means to an end.…I was not then, or now, in love with the mere beauty of writing; I judge by its purpose. But before that, I thought it didn’t matter what you wrote, it’s what you say. I began to realize that what you say depends on how you say it. And I was aware of his integration of themes, ideas, and action. I was struggling to find actions for all my many themes, and could not, and he was doing it expertly. He served as an ideal inspiration—it can be done. I had no idea of how I could do it, just a patient determination—I have to discover it.

KS: How do you really reach people with the written word?

AR: You reach people’s intelligence if you know how to present things clearly.

KS: What did the study of logic teach you?

AR: The first syllogism made an erroneous impression on me. It was like a light bulb going off in my mind. The syllogism was ‘All cats have tails, this is a cat, therefore it has a tail.’ My first reaction was: That’s wrong; when people say, for them, it’s just an expression. Then I grasped, as a revelation, that when you says ‘all,’ you must really mean ‘all.’ I was converted to consistency from then on. It made me conscious of the importance of precision, and to what extent you have to use words exactly. I felt an enormous admiration for the discipline of logic, and a faint guilt: They were right, this is how one should handle words and thoughts and I was wrong. I told myself that I must never forget this.

KS: Would you like a drink?

AR: Yes. Thank you.

KS: Why did you decide to become an atheist?

AR: I had decided that the concept of God is degrading to men. Since they say God is perfect, and man can never be that perfect, then man is low and imperfect and there is something above him—which is wrong.

KS: So that’s it?

AR: Well no proof of the existence of God exists; the concept is an untenable invention. Since the concept of God is rationally untenable and degrading to man, I’m against it. It was as simple as that. The essence of my present belief is there. It focused the issue of reason versus mysticism. I had the feeling that atheism was an integration of something that had been growing in me for a long time, not a sudden thought. When I focused on the subject for the first time, the convictions were already there.

KS: What about the fact that some say they have experienced God?

AR: You’re talking about faith. I haven’t any—and it doesn’t make sense to me.

KS: What do you think of America?

AR: America is the greatest country on earth. No—it’s the only country.

KS: Why do you love the city—city lights, city streets, skyscrapers?

AR: They were the symbol of living for your own pleasure and for enjoyment—not for duty or service or misery. They were everything that was non-Soviet.

All quotes are Ayn Rand’s own words found in The Passion of Ayn Rand, a biography by Barbara Branden.