127
The Book Is What Is Real
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terms
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notes
142
[...] It's one thing to sacrifice fulfilment in the service of an ideal; it's another to suppress clear thinking and honest feeling in the service of an ideology. An ideology is valuable only insofar as it is used to intensify clarity and honesty of thought and feeling.
[...] It's one thing to sacrifice fulfilment in the service of an ideal; it's another to suppress clear thinking and honest feeling in the service of an ideology. An ideology is valuable only insofar as it is used to intensify clarity and honesty of thought and feeling.
obloquy
(en)
(noun) a strongly condemnatory utterance; abusive language / (noun) the condition of one that is discredited; bad repute
142
The courage that accepts that task and all the ingratitude and obloquy that go with it is beyond praise
confirm
5 years, 1 month ago
The courage that accepts that task and all the ingratitude and obloquy that go with it is beyond praise
confirm
5 years, 1 month ago
158
[...] I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
[...] The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it nonmetaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; [...]
[...] I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
[...] The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it nonmetaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; [...]