To claim that literature on its own is going to change reality would be an act of madness or arrogance. It seems to me no less foolish to deny that it can aid in making this change.
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Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer
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Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth
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My sense is that all human beings alive have enormous schisms in their experience, terrifying schisms within our feelings and within what we discover the world to be. One premise of art is that anything personal seen deeply enough becomes general, becomes impersonal.
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One of the reasons I think I love writing short stories is that people who love and read them are only there out of a love for literature.
Literature, when it is occurring, is the correspondence of two agoraphobics.
all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character -- not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire -- that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved
