The writer does not choose, he is chosen. It is another question whether he will have the courage to obey the call, but he has still heard a call even if he rejects it …
He who hears it feels he is a “clerk” in the meaning given to the word in the Middle Ages [i.e., a cleric], that is to say a chosen being, set apart in virtue of a personal destiny, consecrated not from any initiative of his own to the service of a good which will be his portion and his heritage. … “Still painting?” said a friend to the painter Bonnard on finding him at his easel. “Of course,” the artist answered, “what would you have me doing?” What else indeed could one have him do? What else could he want to do himself? Michelangelo was made to sculpture or to paint, just as Dante was made to write. Were they to succeed in something else they would still be failures.
… You must take nothing with you, cling to nothing, so as to be held by nothing, keep yourself, like the saint, wholly free for the one thing necessary. … [There is a great similarity between] writers serving their art and Christians serving their God.
“I hold myself unworthy,” Ramuz wrote (on October 10, 1902), “of functions so high. I do not view them as a livlihood, but almost as a priesthood.”
… In the contemplative’s world, said Pascal, everything is hiding a mystery; in the artist’s, the thing hidden is not God, but each thing is the sign of something else, which it already in some measure is, which it is art’s function to bring wholly to be.
… [Rodin says], “Real artists are the most religious of men.”
Poetry even at its purest is not prayer; but it rises from the same depths as the need to pray.
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