From George Steiner's very interesting Paris Review interview, a great epigram that ends with an image worthy of the third writer in Steiner's little list:
"How can you, after Proust and Joyce and Kafka and Faulkner, sit down and write a novel? I've never quite understood. Answer: you have to. And the you have to is a private cancer, a private tumor of the soul."
Steiner had a remarkable mind, a real reader. He is the only critic I know of whom Harold Bloom speaks highly of. I love the elevation to serious fiction of Simenon. Simenon could complete a Maigret novel on a plane ride. or so he claimed. Thanks for the link.
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