Thursday, 3 April 2008

The Quiet Itch of Juliet Stevenson's Tonsured Moustachios


The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its immeasurable distance from life, which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.

from A Humble Remonstrance by Robert Louis Stevenson (1884)

quoted in The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays by Harry Mathews (2003)

No comments: