With All This Darkness Round Me I

To Be An Artist Is To Fail, As No Other Dare Fail, That Failure Is His World And The Shrink From Desertion, Art And Craft, Good Housekeeping, Living.

Art Has Always Been This--pure Interrogation, Rhetorical Question Less The Rhetoric--whatever Else It May Have Been Obliged By Social Reality To Appear.

Over, Over, There Is A Soft Place In My Heart For All That Is Over, No, For The Being Over, Words Have Been My Only Loves, Not Many.

Nothing Matters But The Writing. There Has Been Nothing Else Worthwhile... A Stain Upon The Silence.

The Pendulum Oscillates Between These Two Terms: Suffering-that Opens A Window On The Real And Is The Main Condition Of The Artistic Experience, And Boredom ... That Must Be Considered As The Most Tolerable Because The Most Durable Of Human Evils.