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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

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The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

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My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying som...more

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Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave be...more