18 quotes
Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
Writing and Being (1991)
'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.'
Writing and Being (1991)
The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.
Writing and Being (1991)
The process of standing apart and being involved has come.
Writing and Being (1991)
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
Writing and Being (1991)
It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.
Writing and Being (1991)
Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the existential position with particular implications for literature.
Writing and Being (1991)
Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.
Writing and Being (1991)
The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do.
Writing and Being (1991)
There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment.
Writing and Being (1991)
'Courage in and talent in one's work.'
Writing and Being (1991)
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
Writing and Being (1991)
'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.'
Writing and Being (1991)
There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic.
Writing and Being (1991)
The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.
Writing and Being (1991)
Perhaps it is the positive knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist.
Writing and Being (1991)
I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books . . . But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could.
Writing and Being (1991)
I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both.
Writing and Being (1991)