But the truth is, that when a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
Most writers have no other quality than the reader: taste. But the latter has the better taste, because he does not write, and the best if he does not read.
Some people say I'm one of those guys with blessings in life overlooked. Sometimes I feel like the tatter torn pages of some old paperback book.
The writer must offend people if he's going to be effective. It's like someone once said about opera. "Stab a tenor and he sings." Stab a writer, or step on his toes, and he'll write. It's an automatic reflex reaction. A writer writes because it's his response to the world. It's a natural process, like respiration.? But above all, a writer must have a capacity for indignation. The capacity for indignation is the most important thing for a creative person. Not the aesthetic capacity but the capacity for indignation. And especially indignation at the treatment afforded other people. To see a blind and deaf baby and to feel anger, to feel fury, at the starving of children and the arrest of political dissidents. That is the basis of the writer.
All the books that I have seen about the science and the economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Writers are as jealous as pigeons.