For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.
The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.
Try as I do to comprehend the human project and my part in it, I am further than ever from understanding the monstrous everyday things that seem like self-evident truths and existential necessities to so many.
Man himself is a mysterious object, and the tools to probe his physiologic nature and function have developed only slowly through the millennia.
The pursuit of natural knowledge, the investigation of the world - mental and material - in which we live, is not a dull and spiritless affair: rather is it a voyage of adventure of the human mind, a holiday for reckless and imaginative souls.
Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.