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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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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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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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The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its ...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 modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the max...more

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