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143 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it -- lessens its immediacy and depth, weakens its muscles and dilutes its blood.
Living with alcohol is living with death close at hand. What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.
When you're writing, a kind of instinct comes into play. What you're going to write is already there in the darkness. It's as if writing were something outside you, in a tangle of tenses. Between writing and having written, having written and having to go on writing; between knowing and not knowing what it's all about; starting from complete meaning, being submerged by it, and ending up in meaninglessness. The image of a black block in the middle of the world isn't far out.
It's almost a question of muscles, of physical dexterity. You have to move faster than the non-writing part of you, which is always up there on the plane of thought, always threatening to fade out, to disappear into limbo as far as the future story is concerned; the part which will never descend to the level of writing, which refuses all drudgery.
Writing isn't just the telling of stories. It's the exact opposite. It's telling everything at once.
And some things remain unknown even to the author. In my case, some of the things Lol V. Stein does, some of the risks she takes... I can't translate it or convey its meaning because I'm completely with Lol V. Stein and she herself doesn't quite know what she's doing or why.
I've talked a lot about writing. But I don't know what it is.
Now that I know it I no longer have the word to say it. It's just there, and it can't be named anymore.
...wherever you think imagination is absent, that's where it's at its most powerful.
A writer who hasn't known women, who has never touched a women's body and perhaps never read any books or poems written by a women, and yet thinks he's been involved in literature, is mistaken.
The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a women, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.
I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness.
When cities are bombed there are always ruins and corpses left. But you can drop an atomic bomb in the sea and ten minutes later it's back as it was before. You can't change the shape of water.