”There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence; to consider the matter from the purely utilitarian point of view, an artist might do humanity more good than any other has ever done by work so complex that only the six cleverest men in his country could understand it, provided it was powerful enough to affect them.”
~ Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity
“Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies. Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, Like Cold River, or like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.”
Mysterious Author Reveals – A Little Bit
The novelist known as Elena Ferrante: “I didn’t choose anonymity. The books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago, I felt the burden of exposing myself in public, I wanted to detach myself from the finished story; I wanted the books to assert themselves without my patronage.”