Silence also has its importance. Doesn't one hear silence in poetry? A line of poetry is not only the alternation of sounds, but even more the organization of pauses, the arrangement of silence and stillness.


We publicists and critics merely rationalize things, but you, as a writer, at one stroke, in a single image, have exhibited the very essence of it [the real tragedy of servitude] for all to see, so that one can literally feel it with one's fingers, so that the most unthinking reader can understand it. That's the secret of true artistry, that's the truth of art ...


A consuming uneasiness, its sensory network, a loss of all focus in view of a threat, a sense of one's fragility, how to describe that complex feeling? By outrageous fortune unharmed as I have been, it is a feeling I've had in dreams, and only a little less intensely while wide awake. Was it hatched in childhood dreams, in all innocence? The feeling of a vast menace, a yellowish-grey-green feeling, even in one childhood dream coupled with the image of a cat on hind legs, carrying a ladder, a black cat, red ladder - later believed ludicrous, yet only last night re-drawn as a ...