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We did not want to delight our public with its superiority to a dead world--we wanted to take it by the throat. Let every character be a trap, let the reader be caught in it, and let him be tossed from one consciousness to another as from one absolute and irremediable universe to another similarly …

[...] they no longer felt humanity as a limitless milieu. It was a thin flame within them which they alone kept alive. It kept itself going in the silence which they opposed to their executioners. About them was nothing but the great polar night of the inhuman and of unknowingness, which they did n…

When we were still schoolboys on the lycée benches or in the Sorbonne amphitheatres, the leafy shadow of the beyond spread itself over literature. We knew the bitter and deceptive taste of the impossible, of purity, of impossible purity. We felt ourselves to be in turn the unsatisfied and the Ari…

Such optimism was at the opposite extreme of the writer's conception of his art; the artist needs an unassimilable matter because beauty is not resolved into ideas. Even if he is a prose-writer and assembles signs, his style will have neither grace nor force if it is not sensitive to the material c…

On the one hand, the literary object has no other substance than the reader's subjectivity; Raskolnikov's waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collection of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred wh…