The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.

We must not force our poets to limit the world any further. That is a crime against life itself. If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest

and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?

Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness.

Either a nation faces its uncomfortable truths, or it is overwhelmed by them; for there is a prophetic consequence in the perpetuation of lies, just as there is an unavoidable fate for all those who refuse to see.

There are some things on earth that are stronger than death. One of these is the eternal human quest for justice; a people cannot live without it, and in due course they will be prepared to die to make it possible for their children.

Fables are made of this.

It was then that the “passion to know,” which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect if against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light. That is the sense in which I understand and share Hermann Broch’s insistence in repeating: The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.

I don’t know. I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on “progressing” as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.