lily’s Reviews > The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them > Status Update

“I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of "craft." I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world[…] As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits-of omitting needless words.”