literature

When there is noise and crowds, there is trouble; When everything is silent and perfect, There is just perfection and nothing To fill the air.

I can see myself before myself__ being through dark scenery.

Great poets are great copy editors.

What you gain here, you lose on the other side.

My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.

Play With WORDS

I write for the beauty of the printed word"from PREFACE to BIPOLAR BUFFALO

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don__ know. Likewise, I don__ know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I__ reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.

Literature for me_ tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared with the reader. So that would mean that literature is stories that put themselves at the disposal of readers who want to heal themselves. Their healing power lies in their honesty, the freshness of their vision, the new and unexpected things they show, the increase in power and responsibility they give the reader.

A writer's mind is a place where demons kill angels in disguise.

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

Wriggling around, two fingers deep in my back end like some teenage boy unsure what he should be tugging at inside his girlfriend__ nether region I wrestled a fifty free.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. __ To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. ____ The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.

Marx was troubled by the question of why ancient Greek art retained an __ternal charm_, even though the social conditions which produced it had long passed; but how do we know that it will remain __ternally_ charming, since history has not yet ended? Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own, and began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge. One result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them in the light of our own preoccupations; once this became less possible, the drama might cease to speak at all significantly to us.The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns - indeed that in one sense of __ur own concerns_ we are incapable of doing anything else - might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually been valuing the __ame_ work at all, even though they may think they have. __ur_ Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor __ur_ Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a __ifferent_ Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are __ewritten_, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a __e-writing_. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.