The Scots are bigger swine than the English and only a little better than the Welsh. Though really they’re the same, but they make an effort not to seem it, and since they know how to pretend, they succeed. The English are swine, too, but not as bad as the Welsh. “The Welsh are swine,” said the one-legged man in reply to a question from his son. So what is top-notch writing? The same thing it's always been: the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking.”īetween Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003 Which doesn't mean writing well, because anyone can do that, but writing incredibly well, and not even that, because anyone can write incredibly well. It's possible to have many homelands, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and that passport is obviously the quality of one's writing. In fact, a writer can have many homelands, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends greatly on what he's writing at the moment. And other times a writer's only homeland is his steadfastness and courage. And sometimes a writer's homeland isn't the people he loves but his memory. Though it's also true that a writer's homeland isn't his language or isn't only his language but the people he loves. It sounds a little demagogic but I completely agree with him, and I know that sometimes we have no choice but to be demagogic, just as sometimes we have no choice but to dance a bolero under a streetlight or a red moon. “The homeland of a writer, he said, is his language.
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