“Trio,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Writers, like all artists, are concerned to represent reality, to create a more absolute and complete reality than reality itself.  They must, if they are to accomplish this, assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude; in consequence, their beliefs are, of course, going to find their way into their work.  What artists believe, however, is of secondary importance, ancillary to the work itself.  A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.  Lawrence will be read whatever one thinks of his notions on sex.  Dante is read in the Soviet Union.

A work of art, on the other hand, has a representative and expressive function.  In this representation the author’s ideas, his judgments, the author himself, are engaged with reality.   

Alberto Moravia in Writers at Work:  The Paris Review Interviews First Series, edited and with an introduction by Malcolm Cowley

Comments are welcome!