Whenever you do a new interpretation of a great, previous text of any kind, you always look for some kind of immediate significance right now.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time.
After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.
So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.