A Writer's Work

Interviewer: All writers complain of the constraint under which they work and of the difficulty of writing.
Cendrars: To make themselves sound interesting, and they exaggerate. They should talk a little more about their privileges and how lucky they are to be able to earn some return from the practice of their art, a practice I personally detest, it's true, but which is all the same a noble privilege compared with the lot of most people, who live like parts of a machine, who live only to keep the gears of society pointlessly turning. I pity them with all my heart. Since my return to Paris I have been saddened as never before by the anonymous crowd I see from my windows engulfing itself in the Métro or pouring out of the Métro at fixed hours. Truly, that isn't life. It isn't human. It must come to a stop. It's slavery ... not only for the humble and poor, but the absurdity of life in general.
— Blaise Cendrars, in Writers at Work - The Paris Review Interviews, 3rd Series, George Plimpton (ed.), p. 33.

[Asked about Dashiell Hammett's testimony before the Army-McCarthy hearinngs:]
     Yes. It was on television.... I think McCarthy, said to him, "Mr. Hammett, if you were in our position, would you allow your books in U.S.I.S. libraries?" And he said, "If I were you, Senator, I would not allow any libraries." A good remark. McCarthy laughed. Nobody else did, but McCarthy did. Dash had an extremely irritating habit of shrugging his shoulders. For years I would say, "Please don't shrug your shoulders." I don't know why it worried me, but it did. He was shrugging his shoulders like mad at the committee. He'd give an answer, and he'd shrug his shoulders with it. And when he was finished and got to the airport he rang me up and said,"Hey, how did you like it? I was shrugging my shoulders just for you."
— Lillian Hellman, in Ibid., p. 134.

Interviewer: Mary McCarthy has characterized you as a soured utopian. Is that accurate?
Burroughs: I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up the marks. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable. Like the advertising people we talked about, I'm concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action, not to go out and buy a Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in the reader's consciousness. You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.
— William S. Burroughs, in Ibid., p. 174.

     And though indeed that is united with thy heaven as one body, and so together is but the one body of God, yet thou art not become a creature in that very place which is above many hundred thousand miles off, but thou art in the heaven of this world, which contains also in it such a Deep as is not of any human numbering.
     The true heaven is everywhere, even in that very place where thou standeth and goeth; and so when thy spirit presses through the astral and the fleshly, and apprehends the innermost moving of God, then it is clearly in heaven....
— The Confessions of Jacob Böehme, W. Scott Palmer (tr.), pp. 22-23.

     God has set light and darkness before everyone; thou mayest embrace which thou wilt, thou dost not thereby move God in his being. His Spirit goes forth from him and meets all those that seek him. Their seeking, in which he desireth humanity; for humanity is his image, which he has created according to his whole being and wherein he will see and know himself. Yes, he dwells in man, why then are we men so long a-seeking? Let us but seek to know ourselves we find all; we need run nowhere to seek God, for we can thereby do him no service; if we do but seek and love one another, then we love God; what we do to one another, that we do to God; whosoever seeketh and findeth his brother and sister hath sought and found God. In him we are all one body of many members, everyone having its own office, government and work, and that is the wonder of God.
— The Confessions of Jacob Böehme, W. Scott Palmer (tr.), pp. 94-95.