"Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work." The Aesthetic of Silence, Susan Sontag.
There’s also an almost unbearable sense of intimacy between author and reader — Céline famously said “what interests me is a direct message to the nervous system.” His total reliance on ellipses forecloses the cheap little tricks used to construct the artifice of what we are told is “good” writing: the strategic period, the melodramatic line break,... See more
One evening, in the horizontal light, soft and colourful, with an acute sense of my depravity, having just published a piece with the phrase ‘satyric schlong’ alongside observations from a nudist bathhouse in Sweden, I sought refuge in the pages of Kafka’s diaries, that ‘twenty-first century Dante.’
“Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: copyright infringement is the only commercially significant use of the Grokster and StreamCast services, and that is no accident.”