Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Literature
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In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect.
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I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.
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When my relations with the Communist Party gave me the necessary perspective I decided to write my autobiography. I wanted to show how a man can pass from literature held sacred to action which nevertheless remains that of an intellectual.
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The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.
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What I ask of [the writer] is not to ignore the reality and the fundamental problems that exist. The world's hunger, the atomic threat, the alienation of man, I am astonished that they do not color all our literature.
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The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.
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For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged.
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I am not recommending "popular" literature which aims at the lowest.
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I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.
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That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?
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If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
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Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter.
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