“I do not think, if one is a writer, that one escapes it by trying to become something else. One does not become something else: one becomes nothing. And what is crucial here is that the writer, however unwillingly, always, somewhere, knows this. There is no structure he can build strong enough to keep out [...]
“The first quivering word [the writer] puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain. The process of putting down downs words is equivalent to giving oneself a narcotic.”
“The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.”
“To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way [...]
“I didn’t dare to think of anything then except the “facts”. To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn’t become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being [...]
“In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”
“I was born poeta. The other things were chance. But if you don’t do what you were born to do, it destroys you.”