The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don't care what you'll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
Those who write clearly have readers.
We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.
The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
It is immoral not to tell.
A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
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