Interviewer: Do you keep a sort of abstract potential reader or viewer in mind when you work?
Cocteau: You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle. It is fichu.
A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. "The world is my representation." Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transfo…
I was searching in this congeries.
william carlos williams
The fascination of these contemporary interviews, for me, is that each brings vividly before us, as a person seemingly different, gifted with a more instinctive sense of freedom, a writer who can never be sure that his emotions, his habits, his childhood, his loves and enmities, are not crucial to …
It is great not required of the writer in these interviews that he be and wise. We all know, we readers of contemporary literature, that our novelists and poets do not live better than we do. What is required is that the writer be gifted, which ever since the Romantic period has meant vividness, a …
