For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.
A writer without his country is nothing.
For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.
I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.
Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.
There are loads of countries that have nice written constitutions like ours. But there aren't loads of countries where they're followed.
An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.
The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.