It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.
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A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
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Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.
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To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
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The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.
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Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
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Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
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Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us ...
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I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
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My father and he had one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
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In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.
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Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
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The original is unfaithful to the translation.
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The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
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Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
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Nothing is built on stone all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
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To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
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Life itself is a quotation.
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Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
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Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
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There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
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Life and death have been lacking in my life.
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Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
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There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics I refer to the infinite.
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It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his "nocturnes" answered: "All of my life." With the same rigor he c...
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It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his 'nocturnes' answered: 'All of my life.' With the same rigor he c...
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