#163

“Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal” (Camus, 2000: 23).

CAMUS, Albert (2000). The Myth Of Sisyphus. Translation by Justin O'Brien. London: Penguin Books.

#162

“It's the price of being a writer. One is dogged by the past – pain, sensations, rejections, all of it. I believe that this clinging to the past is a zealous, albeit hopeless, desire to reinvent it so that one could change it. Doctors, lawyers, and many other stable citizens are not afflicted by a persistent memory. In their way, they might be just as disturbed as you or I, except that they don't know it. They don't delve” (id, 103).

#161

“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties” (id, 100).

#160

“I have never written about things as they happened. All my works are indeed chapters from my most personal experience, but nevertheless they are not “the story of my life.” The things that happened to me in my life have already happened, they are already formed, and time has kneaded them and give them shape. To write things as they happened means to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process. To my mind, to create means to order, sort out, and choose the words and pace that fit the work. The materials are indeed materials from one's life, but ultimately the creation is an independent creature” (Roth, 2002: 27).

ROTH, Philip (2002). Shop Talk. London: Vintage.

#159

“To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about my sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of my discouragement – I seem to glimpse it in my dreams – my despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and the populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world” (Cheever, 1993: 146-147).

CHEEVER, John (1993). The Journals. London: Vintage.

#158

“It is strange, the morbid inclination we have to derive satisfaction from the fact (generally false and always irrelevant) that a work of art is traceable to a “true story”. Is it because we begin to respect ourselves more when we learn that the writer, just like ourselves, was not clever enough to make up a story himself? Or is something added to the poor strength or our imagination when we know that a tangible fact is at the base of the “fiction” we mysteriously despise? Or taken all in all, have we here that adoration of the truth which makes little children ask the story-teller “Did it really happen?”” (Nabokov, 1961: 40).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (1961). Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions.

#156

“We are speaking here of literature as spiritual prostitution; prostitution because, to write it, one must serve. One must ingratiate oneself, pay court, display oneself, show off one's stylistic muscles, make confession, confide in the reader, render unto him what one holds most dear, compete for his attention, keep alive his interest – in a word, one has to suck up to, wheedle, and wait upon, one has to sell oneself” (id, 114).

#155

“Literature always is parasitic on the mind of the reader. Love, a tree, a park, a sigh, an earache – the reader understands, because the reader has experienced it. It is possible, of course, with a book to rearrange the furniture inside a reader's head, but only to the extent that there is some furniture there already, before the reading” (id, 71).

#154

“The writing of a novel is a from of the loss of creative liberty... In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he enslaved himself – by the theme selected. The critic is in a worse position: as the convict is chained to his wheelbarrow, so the reviewer is chained to the work reviewed. The writer looses his freedom in his ow book, the critic in another's” (Lem, 1999: 3).

LEM, Stanislaw (1999). A Perfect Vacuum. Translation by Michael Kandel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

#153

“There are two basic contexts in which a work of art may be placed: either in the history of its nation (we call this the small context), or else in the supranational history of its art (the large context). We are accustomed to seeing music quite naturally in the large context: knowing what language Orlando de Lassus or Bach spoke matters little to a musicologist, but because a novel is bound up with its language, in nearly every university in the world it is studied almost exclusively in the small, national context. Europe has not managed to view its literature as historical unit, and I continue to insist that this is an irreparable intellectual loss. Because, if we consider just the history of the novel, it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew constant inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert's tradition living on in Joyce, it was through this reflection on Joyce that Hermann Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Márquez the possibility of departing from tradition to “write another way”” (Kundera, 2007: 35).

KUNDERA, Milan (2007). The Curtain: An Essay In Seven Parts. Translation by Linda Asher. London: Faber And Faber.

#152

“Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run “amok” against society; but I preferred that society should run “amok” against me, it being the desperate party” (id, 171).

#151

“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable, and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications.” (id, 136).

#150

“ His [Plato] Dialogues, which contain what is immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are under-bred and low lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsmen who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us” (id, 107).

#149

“The work of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing.” (id, 104).

#148

“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, had done little to bring us nearer to the heroic heroes of antiquity” (id, 100).

#147

“To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip” (id, 94).

#146

“Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay it is overrated; and it is our selfishness that overrates it” (id, 76).