Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Interpretation
Writers should focus on depicting characters' journeys towards or away from virtue rather than simply illustrating what virtue is.
This quote highlights the role of writers in exploring the complexities of human nature. Instead of merely presenting idealized notions of virtue, the writer's task is to reveal the struggles and choices that characters make, illustrating the paths individuals can take in their moral journeys.
In practice
During a writing workshop, you might share this quote to inspire budding authors.
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after youβve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.
A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.
Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.
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