“My explanation is that we have no great literature. But readers need it, not as medicine, not as delusion, but because they need someone to tell them there is no medicine.”
– László Krasznahorkai, “Interview With László Krasznahorkai” by George Szirtes, The White Review September 2013
“The portrait does not recall a distant present; rather, it brings absence closer, so close that its call is silent.”
– Jean-Luc Nancy, Art, Multiple Arts: The Muses (via)
“All writers believe they are realists. … The discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outworn forms. … Academic criticism in the West, as in the Communist countries, employs ‘realism’ as if reality were already entirely constituted (whether for good and all, or not) when the writer comes on the scene. Thus it supposes that the latter’s role is limited to ‘explaining’ and to ‘expressing’ the reality of his period. … The style of the novel does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation. … I do not translate, I construct. This had been even the old ambition of Flaubert: to make something out of nothing, something that would stand alone, without having to lean on anything external to the work; today this is the ambition of the novel as a whole. …”
– Alain Robbe-Grillet, “From Realism to Reality,” Towards a New Novel
“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.”
– Vladimir Nabokov, “The Art of Literature and Commonsense”
[See Dylan Nice and William Gaddis.]
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
– Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
[See Roland Barthes.]
“There is a world that poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.”
– Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (via)
“I want to evoke all the things that are a part of our lives, but not of our stories — the washing up, the changing of diapers, the in-between-things — and make them glow. Though a five-page description of what’s in a closet is not exactly page-turner stuff, I thought of this project as a kind of experiment in realistic prose. How far is it possible to go into detail before the novel cracks and becomes unreadable? Oh, it’s a shameful venture, no one wants to be boring or banal, but that was what I set out to do. The first book is centered on death, and it’s like bathing in triviality, and then death. When death is near, everything is meaningful, everything glows, everything is intense. The second book has the same pattern, except that the center of the book is the negation of death, i.e. falling in love. So: bathing in a sea of triviality, then love. Around love, everything is meaningful, glowing, intense. This is the structure of life: large chunks of meaninglessness. Time just passes away, nothing really happens, and then death, or love, or birth.”
– Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Bookforum Talks With Karl Ove Knausgaard” by Trevor Laurence Jockims, Bookforum 24 June 2013
“The fleck in the upper right quadrant is not an accidental imperfection but is in fact the subject of the shot itself.”
– Nicholas Rombes, “The Carmen Horse: The First Frame of Each Shot from Lana Del Rey’s video Carmen: Part III,” Berfrois 3 May 3013
“I want every sentence of this book to be a climax.”
– Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life
[See Bruno Schulz.]
“Nothing is more fantastic, ultimately, than precision.”
– Alain Robbe-Grillet, “From Realism to Reality,” For a New Novel
ANDREW GALLIX 