A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.
My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions.
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.