Two quotations about/from authors I haven’t yet read, so probably shouldn’t be mentioning

by Steve

Man and woman writing

“Asked, in 1954, why he chose to change languages, Beckett answered: out of a “need to be ill equipped”. His response is exceedingly sly because, if you listen more attentively, its boastful tone is deafening. For in French the need “to be ill equipped” (d’être mal armé) doesn’t sound very different from the need to be (another) Mallarmé (d’être Mallarmé). Anything less than a Mallarmé status would not have been enough for a Beckett on his quest for the new self.”

“My being a poet probably has something to do with my preferring questions to answers, ambiguity to resolution, and with my being bored to tears by most of the mainstream supposedly realistic novels that run bland 21st-century sentences through 19th-century structures in order to produce what’s essentially very inefficient television.”

Image from Mennonite Church USA Archives, via Flickr