The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts.
Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling.
You can always be quoted.
That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.
We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling.
When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.
I'm more cautious about what I write.
The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.
I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.
The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
There is an understandable vindictiveness in people who come from Communist countries. They want to keep telling us that we were fools to think that we could make radical changes in our society. Though I understand their dismay, respect their suffering and don't understand the gullibility of some people who don't take in how repressive these societies are, I still think it's important to keep people of all kinds as active in civic matters as possible.
You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.
I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay.
It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.
Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
Using quotations was at first quite spontaneous for me, but then this use became strengthened through reflection. But originally this practice came out of temperament.
I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
We are ruled by quotations.
My skull is crammed with quotations.
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