Speak, Volodya

"Literature is invention.  Fiction is fiction.  To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.   Every great writer is a great deceiver."

"Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. ‘To take upon us the mystery of things’—what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and for Cordelia—this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol’s ‘The Greatcoat,’ or more correctly ‘The Carrick’); another poor fellow is turned into a beetle (Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’)—so what? There is no rational answer to ’so what.’ We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss."

Video (part I, part II) and text.

"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann."