The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

In art and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal to the universal in the race.

Art is here taken to mean knowledge realized in action.

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good. Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.

Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction:

Simply to participate.

For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of social salvation — it is her means of touching the world with her ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence — it is his subtly critical condemnation of the world.

Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.