If you’re gonna hold a bird, you have to hold it with a certain tension, or it will fly away. But if you crush it, you’re gonna kill it. I gotta learn how to hold the bird.
“ I don’t think the avant-garde applies in this country, anyhow. I think it’s a whole different kind of thing that goes on here. Because the continental avant-garde was, first of all, elitist. It depended on the existence of a literary class, which we don’t have here, not in the same sense as you have there. It implies a militant approach, it implies leaders and followers. What we have here is much more diffuse throughout the country at large. “
Ronald Sukenick