“What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.” ―
Paul Valéry
An influential French symbolist poet, Paul Valéry was a thinker and a writer who believed in exact representation. Rather than dwell on his history which is diverse and intriguing, his view of the world and thought were the primary influences of his writing.
I adore this quote: “The very act of writing, he decided, was one of vanity, and set to free himself at no matter what cost, from those falsehoods: literature and sentiment.”
