Victor Shklovsky on "Quoting"

Quoting is necessary. I have said and will say again that we are walking holding on to the quotes, as we would hold onto a wall.


And, also, there is nothing truer than a quote, and the harder the work is, the harder is the task of quoting; and Tolstoy, whose work, whose soul, is continuously alive and continuously grows, is one of the most difficult examples.


. . .


Besides, the idea of quoting, the transporting of a thought into a new context, changes the original meaning of the phrase.


Victor Shklovsky

Tolstoy

I know this feeling very well--even now, I have been experiencing it lately: everything seems to be ready for the writing--for fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion; an earthly, spontaneous energy that is impossible to invent. And it's impossible to begin without it.

Tolstoy
(qtd. Viktor Shklovsky in The Energy of Delusion)
(bold mine)

Pasternak

All his life, at every moment, he possessed the faculty of seeing phenomena in the detached finality of each separate instant, in perfectly distinct outline, as we see only on rare occasions, in childhood, or on the crest of an all-renewing happiness, or in the triumph of a great spiritual victory.

To see things like that, our eye must be directed by passion. For it is passion that by its flash illuminates an object, intensifying its appearance.

Such passion, the passion of creative contemplation, Tolstoy constantly carried with him. It was precisely in its light that he saw everything in its pristine freshness, in a new way, as if for the first time. The authenticity of what he saw differs so much from what we are used to that it may appear strange to us. But Tolstoy was not seeking that strangeness, was not pursuing it as a goal, still less did he apply it to his works as a literary method.

Pasternak, from People and Situations (1956)
(qtd. by Richard Pevear in the Introduction to War and Peace)

Tolstoy

To evoke in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling--this is the activity of art. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the perceiver, the separation between himself and the artist--not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds perceive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.

Tolstoy "What is Art?"