You wonder about people who made a fortune, and you always think they drank it up or stuck it up their nose. That’s not usually what brings on the decline. It’s usually the battle to keep your creative child alive while keeping your business shark alive. You have to develop cunning and shrewdness, and other things which are not well-suited to the arts.
“English writers write spoken English and American writers write spoken American. And the most striking thing of all is that their scientists, their scholars and their historians write an English that is the English of the man in the street, whereas in France, when it comes to science or history, we are still obliged to write in formal language. I want to write in a living language — in the language of the ordinary man.”
Raymond Queneau