The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
I strongly believe that literature can do something that nothing else can do, and that is embody the human spirit.
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.