When we listen to a work of art, we do not contemplate or enjoy ourselves, we restore a broken balance, we affirm what we shamefully denied all day long; the full reality of our acts, of our hope, of our freedom, the obscure certainty that existence has a meaning, an air, a guarantor.
The writer is the living and dynamic repository of each of us, as we are - the Poet also said it - "the living tombs of the ancestors"... Because even when they paint on him, they paint us; when he cries, he does it in our name, when he prays for him, he does it with us and for us. He testifies about us in our favor for eternity...
The writer is a reflection of each of his readers in his own mirror; when he ceases to be such a multiplied image, he ceases to be a writer; if there was never such a transgression, it means that he was always only an author, not a writer. In turn, through a strange communion, the writer is the reflection, the projection of his readers, their receptacle. He knows how to say better than us what we want to say, in him we find the expression of our own thoughts.
The poetic word deifies man - And the one who composes it and the one who listens to it, and man, in turn, deifies the word.
Literature is not an amusement, but a form, a way of searching for truth, for reason. From a book, at least two or three moments remain with you forever, but those represent peaks of humanity, of truth.
Literature is, as a whole, more memory and consciousness of humanity turned back on itself than fantasy.
Progress and tradition are not opposite but complementary categories in art - and not only in art ... nothing in literature and art is wholly or entirely old ... the age's acceptance of a formula do not exclude for eternity the opposite.
Art should enhance the humanity and love between us.
A true artist is a tribune and a prophet.
Every artist should know how to listen, understand and warm to the ideal of enthusiastic and impatient crowds.
I think we have to renounce all literary slavery once and for all. It's time to no longer serve as a sounding board and to sing from now on from our heart and soul.
Poetry cannot fail to faithfully reflect the era in which it is written, for the poet's imagination, as well as his judgment, are formed and modified by reading, by everyday life and by countless circumstances, finally, by everything that surrounds him and act on him.
All things have a mystery, and poetry is the mystery of all things; neither I nor you and nobody knows what it is.
Literature... the form in which the ideas, beliefs and knowledge of a nation are recorded, only it can give a precise awareness of the relationships that exist between the people and things of a time with the true ideas, it is the treasury in which the knowledge of societies is deposited.
Nothing serves better to appreciate and measure the condition of a people than literature, for it is the form in which the knowledge and moral and intellectual condition of a nation is set forth and recorded.
I, when I write a book, write only half of it; the second is written by the readers.
Artwork: ... the only thing in the world I admit isn't natural.
The absolute impartiality of the artist, the perfect objectivity of his work appears to me as something more and more chimerical...
The artist necessarily takes a stand; and it is best to be clear about it. Write to prove something, whatever it is.
The creations of a people are, in the last analysis, the justification for that people's existence.
Every artist must have as a matter of conscience the painting of the world in which he lives.
Art creates: the reality captured by an artist's eye is created anew, its rawness is added to the warmth of that artist's soul, and dressed only in this new garment, it can have the right to a new life, to an eternal life.
We have knowledge of the world only to the extent that it stands in relation to man, and we want no other art than that which is an expression of this relation.
As a man and as a citizen, the poet loves his homeland, but his true homeland, the one in which he exercises his poetic faculties, is nobility, beauty, which are not tied to any province or country; this beauty and this nobility he seizes and gives form to wherever he finds them.
Art: another nature, just as mysterious, but more intelligible; for it proceeds from the intellect.
To protect yourself from the world there is no surer way than art, and through nothing we bind ourselves more closely to the world than through art.
Grateful to the nature that also produced him, the artist produces a second nature.
Who ignites the storm of passions / and bathes the twilight in passions? / And on the dear path who spreads / vaults of branches and spring flowers? / From poor green leaves, who crowns / the chosen ones with immortality but / and, in Olympus, who gathers the gods? / Avântu-embodied: the poet only.
Poets who wept for the people stifled the cry of your passions... The poet who began to weep with the crowd, lost the right to his own tears.
What a strange division of roles: in life, joy speaks, suffering is silent - in art it's the other way around. Suffering cries out, joy almost has no words.