Gosford Parkour05/06/2008
“ In truth, a writer’s homelands can be many, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends a great deal on whatever he is writing at the moment. The homelands can be many, it occurs to me now, but the passport can only be one, and that passport is evidently the quality of his writing. Which does not mean writing well, because anyone can do that, but writing marvelously well, and not even that, because anyone can write marvelously well, too. What, then, is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick one’s head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation. To run along the edge of the precipice: on one side the bottomless abyss and on the other the faces one loves, the smiling faces one loves, and books, and friends, and food. And to accept that fact, though sometimes it may weigh on us more than the flagstone that covers the remains of every dead writer. Literature, as an Andalusian folk song might say, is dangerous „
Roberto Bolaño, on accepting the Rómulo Gallegos prize for Los detectives salvajes, 1999. TripleCanopy, qui.
Quote posted at 08:25
