Spare Time’s Reviews > In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing > Status Update

Dealings with the world, yes, at any time they are entirely ours. But the words—the written form in which we enclose them, attentive to the red margins of our note-books—are not. We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing.

The "genuine ' real life," as Dostoyevsky called it, is an obsession, a torment for the writer. With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction.

Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up.