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Friday, April 22, 2022

On writers - madmen, recluses, heretics, dreamers, rebels, skeptics...

True literature can thrive only in places where literature is created not by obedient and reliable bureaucrats but by madmen, recluses, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. Where a writer must be reasonable, faithful like a Catholic, useful in the present moment, where he cannot flail at everyone as Jonathan Swift did or smile at everything as Anatole France does, there can be no literature that is cast in bronze - there can only be the sort printed on paper, the newsprint sort that’s read today and used to wrap bars of soap tomorrow. 

- Yevgeny Zamyatin