The genuine novelist creates his characters in the infinite directions of his possible life; the factious novelist creates them on the unique line of his real life.
Literature, art and poetry could not exist without the homeland, without the fundamental feeling, meant precisely to provide these flowers with the necessary climate and warmth.
Despite the realistic tradition of European art, one cannot, in fact, speak of absolute realism. Such realism, when it existed (expressed through works devoid of any artistic value), is nothing but the fruit of a passive attitude towards reality... Now, an authentic artist is always driven by the desire to submit reality to his will , he actually has a conquering psychology.
The heroes of great writers - only they have such a privilege! - they enter our world, they live among us, they are part of the people we have known.
I have often wondered how the world is reflected in the eyes of a man who has never read a book in his life...
A world not passed through books, not shaped by them, not influenced by their letters, doesn't it look different than the one discovered after reading? Justified question, since the passion for reading is usually born at an age when we still don't know much about the life around us. Because reading, in fact, precedes knowledge and, of course, influences it... being our first guide, we could say that through it we discover the complexity and beauty of life, its greatness or tragedy...
Contempt and indifference towards books also implicitly means contempt towards man, towards his contradictory, complicated existence...
Paraphrasing a statement that belongs to Tudor Vianu - "I'm afraid of the man who doesn't like music" - ...I would try to say that I am terribly afraid of the man who has never read a book in his life .
There has been a lot of talk lately about that ideal reader who would turn into a kind of collaborator of the author, that reader capable of filling in, with the help of his imagination, the blank spaces between the lines of a book. A reader who first and foremost achieves an active reading, far removed from the lazy reading of the man comfortably settled in his armchair, waiting for everything to be given to him ready, without beating his head too much...
One reads less and less out of the desire to escape to other worlds. It could be said that, almost contrary to such a trend, today the reader wants to remain, through reading, as much as possible in the world he is in, out of the desire to know it as well as possible, to penetrate as deeply as possible its laws that governs it. Moreover, immediate answers are sought…
The book of literature has turned into a kind of guidance, in which blind trust is invested. It is no longer read, so to speak, disinterestedly. We can only subscribe to this grave approach and enjoy the almost hopeless esteem with which literature is beginning to be surrounded...
There is, there must be, a percentage of detachment in reading a book. It is not read only to inform you about this and that thing, it is not read only to clarify more or less immediate questions, it is also read for the sake of immersing yourself in the imagined world, recreated by the writer, and to let yourself be carried away by the "magic of the story". We cannot escape, if we are true readers, the sweet voice of Scheherazade...
The literature book should not be a substitute for other readings: that is not its purpose. A novel cannot and should not replace a documentary book, it should not be read "in place" of a history book, it should not replace information literature or the press.
"The writer - writes Marin Preda in Impossible Return - is interested in what happens to people". It is hard to find another phrase that more precisely, and at the same time so convincingly, defines the writing profession. No other motivation, no matter how justified it may seem at first sight, can substitute for this interest in the human being... If the writer's attention goes, however, elsewhere, if he happens to be disinterested in the fate of man, how will he answer the question why is he writing?...
This is what literature has told us and will continue to tell us: about how man remains, no matter what happens to him, the most important reality on earth! His great passing is recorded by art. One man, unlike any other, always unique.
Ideal reading: the reader's eye should remain fresh, the pleasure of reading unaltered, but she, the reading, should also offer him satisfactions that can only be reached through erudition and high initiation.
In the existence of each of us are decisive readings. They definitely mark us. We live and write under their star. It's hard to say how we would have been if at some point a certain book hadn't called into question everything we thought we knew about literature.
Art fulfills a function similar to that of memory; she chooses from the flow of time the most meaningful, most emotional, most important things and crystallizes these impressions in the pages of books. But the art doesn't stop there. It tends not only to depict the perspective of the past era, but also to reveal to us the horizon of life, to introduce us to the future... All the pathos of our life is in the future.
Writers, throw yourself fearlessly into the flow of life, touch things with your own hands, experience human tragedies yourself in work, in struggle, in victories and failures.
Fiction is sometimes stronger than reality, stronger than truth itself... You cannot write without resorting to fiction. Literature in its entirety is a fabrication, because life is dispersed in plan, in space, in time... It gathers from life certain aspects, an infinite number of scattered facts, and, controlling them, ends up making a realistic work with much more important than life itself.
The ultimate goal of our literature is to discover human genius under the conditions of a higher form of social freedom.
Art has always, in all ages and epochs, been a weapon of class struggle, both for the class consolidating its power and for the class preparing to come to power. It retained this function both when it reflected the process of struggle, and when it painted ages of decay and decay, when it mirrored great sunsets, when it struck direct blows, when it became the consolation of the vanquished.
The place of the artist... is in the heat of battle, where, in the agony, a new world is born.
The task of the artist, as we understand it in the current segment of history, is to extract from reality the typical elements, which the reader's eye can notice, to synthesize ideas, facts, contradictions in vivid and dynamic images and at the same time show the way real development towards a concrete future. We ask the artist to be history, philosopher, politician, organizer of life and harbinger of the future. The artist is the builder of the soul life of mankind.
Art means participation in the process of life, in the unfolding of the most intense phenomena of our life.
Art is one of the ways of communication between people... The particularity of this way of communication, distinguishing it from communication through the word, consists in the fact that, through the word, a person conveys his thoughts to another person, while through art they convey each other's feelings.
To evoke a once-experienced feeling and, reliving it, convey it through movements, lines, colors, images expressed in words, so that the other feels the same feeling - this is what the activity of art consists of.
The hero of my stories, whom I love with all my soul, the one whom I tried to paint in all his splendor and who was, is and always will be worthy of admiration, is the Truth!
The mission of the artist should not be to solve a problem absolutely, but to compel us to love life, in its countless and endless aspects.
An artist who does not have moments of heartbreaking discouragement, the artist who does not go through times when he thinks he is "uncalled" - is not a true artist.