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An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casti...more

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I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

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Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

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We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate...more

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All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and alm...more

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Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from t...more

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The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of th...more

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I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, ...more

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All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

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For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble bl...more

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Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

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The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.