Category: Authors

Can I measure some of the road I have travelled? Have I achieved some of the aims that I set myself, if I ever really did one day set myself aims ? Can I say today that I am what I wanted to be in the old days? I don’t ask myself whether the world in which I live answers my aspirations, for as soon as I’ve answered no, I shan’t have the impression of having progressed any further. But does the life I lead in it correspond to what I wanted, to what I expected?

– Georges Perec in Species of Space and Other Pieces, Edited and Translated with an Introduction by John Sturrock, Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, Penguin Books, 1997.

To begin with, it all seems simple: I wanted to write, and I’ve written. By dint of writing, I’ve become a writer, for myself alone first of all and for a long time, and today for others. In principle, I no longer have any need to justify myself (either in my own eyes or in the eyes of others).  I’m a writer, that’s an acknowledged fact , a datum, self-evident, a definition. I can write or not write, I can go for several weeks or several months without writing, or write ‘well’ or ‘badly’, that alters nothing, it doesn’t  make my activity as a writer into a parallel or complementary activity.  I do nothing else but write (except earn the time to write), I don’t know how to do anything else … I write in order to live and live in order to write …

– Georges Perec in Species of Space and Other Pieces, Edited and Translated with an Introduction by John Sturrock, Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, Penguin Books, 1997.