Everyone is still waiting for the book that everyone greets as the big literary book. People thought it would be a strong year for fiction but it hasn't turned out that way.

Emotion turning back on itself, and not leading on to thought or action, is the element of madness

Colors answer feeling in man; shapes answer thought; and motion answers will.

The significant difference between Proust and Faulkner, for Sartre, is that where Proust discovers salvation in time, in the recovery of time past, for Faulkner time is never lost, however much he may want, like a mystic, to forget time. Both writers emphasize the transitoriness of emotion, of the condition of love or misery, or whatever passes because it is transitory in time. "Proust really should have employed a technique like Faulkner's," Sartre legislates, "that was the logical outcome of his metaphysic. Faulkner, however, is a lost man, and because he knows that he is lost he risks pushing his thoughts to its conclusion. Proust is a classicist and a Frenchman; and the French lose themselves with caution and always end by finding themselves.

We thought it would be nice to start things off with a little charity for a good literary cause.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.