Yeats

“A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedies, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness;”

-- W. B. Yeats

Saul Bellow

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

INTERVIEWER

How much are you conscious of the reader when you write? Is there an ideal audience that you write for?

BELLOW

I have in mind another human being who will understand me. I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding, which is Jewish. And on a meeting of sympathies, which is human. But I have no ideal reader in my head, no. Let me just say this, too. I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.

INTERVIEWER

So there isn't a great deal of calculation about rhetoric?

BELLOW

These are things that can't really be contrived. People who talk about contrivance must think that a novelist is a man capable of building a skyscraper to conceal a dead mouse. Skyscrapers are not raised simply to conceal mice.

-- Saul Bellow at The Paris Review (1966)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Celebrities and Stuff

"Diana Krall - Almost Blue" (Watch on YouTube)

( Read more... )