Form

"Each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone. Indeed the movement of its style must often lead to jeopardizing them, breaking them, even exploding them. Far from respecting certain immutable forms, each new book tends to constitute the laws of its functioning at the same time that it produces their destruction."

-- Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, 1989; trans. Richard Howard

Work

"Routine work, that best of all anodynes which the twentieth century has tried its best to deprive itself of -- that is what I most want. I would not trade the daily trip it gives me for all the mind-expanders and mind-deadeners the young are hooked on."

-- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose