Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know (Michel Houellebecq)

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstacy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant.

Michel Houellebecq (in Submission)