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It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by m...more

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If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

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The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

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We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

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In chaos, there is fertility.

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This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

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She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.

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I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

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The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it o...more

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A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

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I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

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I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essential...more

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The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indign...more

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Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or ...more

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You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in s...more