When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn’t interested any longer. That’s very astonishing.
Category Archive: 1903
The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.
It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention.
In the age of the individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
The latest revelation – from no Mount Sinai, Sermon on the Mount or Bo tree – is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what that creation once was.
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call ‘the breaks.’ In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things – read and write – and wait.
A very great Iliad… concerns the creation of a nation.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
It is the creator of fiction’s point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.