Sublime

“The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation,” he explained. “A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really? Sometimes, this brings staggering discoveri

But the Russians were the first people to master the notion of sending a man into exile at home.

Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of composing a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about.

Chaque nuit, entouré des ronflements de la baraque, il s’est enivré en secret de sa force, du métal de son âme surhumaine dans laquelle un processus mystérieux, commencé dans l’Altaï auprès du trappeur Zolotarev, était en train de s’accomplir : une libération véritable, éternelle, dont il se demande avec une soudaine inquiétude si sa libération tem

And all this terrible transformation took place in him only because he ceased to have faith in himself, and began to believe in others.

pernicious,

For not only is an odd man “not always” a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.

a boy of genius must also be educated by an educator of genius.

Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distil or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be too stupid to recognise them?