AUTHENTICITY. My great fear: that I am pretending to be someone who I am not I have been aware of the fact that I am pretending. But let us think about this: What else could I have done? My ego was unhappy. Had I been preoccupied only with myself, I would have created a literature of accusations and groans. Instead, I kept my distance from the substance I extruded [...] and this helped me artistically.

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Authenticity in literature requires that we do the least possible writing with one or another audience in mind. We do not live in the wilderness, however, and language itself, along with its traditions, rules us and is accompanied by the pressure of expectations from other speakers of that language. I have experienced writing for my Marxist colleagues in my youth [...] during my many years in France and America I did not write for a Western audience, but against it. [...]