In the life of the fighting peoples, writers have been and will remain the vanguard that opens the battle... In their broad souls they encompass and fill the great sorrows of the multitude. They are the representatives of the most advanced believers and from their attire must emerge the ideality of a people's struggle... They last between earth and sky the golden bridge on which the soul of a people shines.
The work of art encompasses within itself at once past, present and future; like any creation of nature, it is the supreme raison d'être of any people... Aesthetic values represent a tendency of superior harmony, they permanently guide the intellectual curve of society, they fix the feeling rhythm of the masses.
Today's artist is a fighter. His creation is no longer meant, as it used to be, to be a beautiful toy, but it must enslave hearts, heat up, crush and bring a pebble for the building of a world that will be new in the interpretation of human duties.
I have always believed that the writer must be a fighter, a trailblazer, a great pedagogue of the nation he belongs to, a man who filters the pains of the people through his soul and turns into a trumpet of alarm.
In literature... I feel tempted by a broad, human poetry beyond fleeting complaints.
I believe in the historical, ancient mission of the writer, and if you asked me what the soul formula is, the one that must be for him not only an ethical commandment, but, at the same time, a literary formula, I would answer you with the old I think: it's the national idea.
I was never drawn to the slogan of the writer's isolation, and the Oratian norm of the odi profanum vulgus could not win me over with its icy charm. I believed, on the contrary, in the point of a fighting literature which melts in its chilling fiery breath the aspirations of the many and prepares their victory in the public consciousness.
The artist cannot isolate himself... He must descend in the midst of the many, let his art be but the enchanted trumpet through which to propagate the aspirations of the nation.
From the voice of the nameless, from the beliefs and hopes that guide those around him, from the lightnings of the air, from the passions that grow in unfathomable depths, the artist plucks, consciously or unconsciously, the accents from which he weaves his song.
Everyone writes, not because they want to, but because they cannot do otherwise.
For me, as a writer, I am not interested in the individual, but I want to reproduce the expression of the crowd, the spiritual whirl of the people of which I am a part.
To create means for an artist... to give life to something that would not exist without him.
I know of no better definition of the word art than this: art is man added to nature.
The poet can be national by painting. Even a completely foreign world, provided only that he looks at this world with the eyes of his national element, with the eyes of his entire people, and feels and speaks so that his countrymen believe that they are and speak themselves.
The writer does not reflect the collective consciousness (in an immediate and mechanical sense) but, on the contrary, pushes to a very advanced degree of coherence the structures that this consciousness has elaborated in a relatively rudimentary way...
The more the work is the expression of a genius thinker or writer, the better it is understood by itself, without the need for the historian to have recourse to the biography or the intentions of the creator. The strongest personality is that which best identifies itself with the life of the spirit, that is, with the essential forces of social consciousness in its active and creative nature.
Literary creation has, among other things, the function of helping the human group to become aware of its problems and aspirations.
True spiritual values do not detach themselves from economic and social reality, but rest on this reality, trying to introduce into it the maximum of solidarity and human community... but the statement that economic and social factors have an influence on literary creation is not a dogma , but a hypothesis, valid only to the extent that it is confirmed by the facts.
Art for art's sake - art with a tendency... It is not true that art resides in a content-independent form or that it would lose its rigor and purity through too close proximity to real life and social struggles, but, it is not nor is it true that we could appreciate the value of a literary work by its content in the name of certain doctrines or certain conceptual norms. The artist does not copy reality or teach truths. He creates beings and things that constitute a more or less vast and unified universe...
In literature, beautiful works are those that make you dream of something beyond what they say.
Literature is... the heart of the universe, winged by all its joys and all its pain, by people's dreams and hopes, by their despair and anger.
By his very nature, man is an artist. He seeks to bring beauty everywhere in his life, in one way or another.
The books formed in me... the feeling of responsibility for all the evil in life, awakening also a pious admiration before the creative force of human reason. Deeply penetrated by the truth of my faith, I say to you all: love the book, it makes your life easier, it helps you in a friendly way to manage in the motley, stormy tangle of thoughts, feelings and events in life; it teaches you to respect man and yourself, it wings your mind and heart with the feeling of love for the world, for man.
True art appears where a mutual and sincere trust is born between the reader and the author.
The purpose of the writer is to pour out on the world, on people, the overflow of his receptacle of impressions, which is called the soul.
Even when it is mediocre, contemporary literature has this great reason for interest that it is alive, that it reflects the trends of the moment, that is, everything that is most important to us who only have a moment of life.
When the political man exercises a policy for the art of the time to express a cultural world if it is a political activity, not an artistic criticism; if the cultural world that is being fought for is a living and necessary fact, its expressiveness will be irresistible and it will find its artists... But if... this irresistible character does not show itself and does not act, it means that it is a world fictitious and false, a lucubration of mediocre people, who complain that people of greater scope than themselves do not agree with them ... this is the way of defending themselves of some petty artists who, out of opportunism, affirm certain principles, but they feel unable to express them artistically, that is, through their own activity...
Art for art's sake and art with tendency: Establishing the principle that in the work of art only its artistic character is to be sought, it is not at all excluded to investigate what kind of feelings and what attitude of life circulates in the work of art itself... it is excluded that a work to be beautiful only because of its moral and political content and not because of its form in which its abstract content has been fused and identified.
A book worthy of this name always belongs to its era through the spirit that animates it.
One of the secrets of genuine talent is to see for the first time, to look at a leaf as if it had never seen leaves before, because only then can it appear to us in all its newness...