Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
ATTRIBUTION:
Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), Swiss-born novelist, poet. Quoted in Mary Anne Caws, Selected Poems: Blaise Cendrars, introduction (1979). Le Lotissement du Ciel (1949).
