“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”

NYROCK: Interview with Chris Cornell, 1999-10-01 https://web.archive.org/web/20030919022841/http://www.nyrock.com/interviews/1999/cornell_int.asp, <br class="br">Euphoria Morning Era

A 1989 interview with Granta magazine founder Bill Buford. Reprinted in Adbusters Magazine #71.

Source: Ask the Dust

Pt. 1, Ch. 4
Sentimental Education (1869)
Context: Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality? Some see things black, others blue — the multitude sees them brute-fashion. There is nothing less natural than Michael Angelo; there is nothing more powerful! The anxiety about eternal truth is a mark of contemporary baseness; and art will become, if things go on in that way, a sort of poor joke as much below religion as it is below poetry, and as much below politics as it is below business. You will never reach its end — yes, its end! — which is to cause within us an impersonal exaltation, with petty works, in spite of all your finished execution.

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), pp. 37-38.

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Interview at Achuka Children's Books
Context: I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvellous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen? Well, there are a few fantasies that are. One of them is Paradise Lost.