The writer’s mastery is not in the hand that writes, the ‘sick’ hand that never lets the pencil go – that can’t let it go because what it holds it doesn’t really hold; what it holds belongs to the realm of shadows, and it is itself a shade. Mastery always characterises the other hand, the one that doesn’t write and is capable of intervening at the right moment to seize the pencil and put it aside. Thus mastery consists in the power to stop writing, to interrupt what is being written, thereby restoring to the present instant its rights, its decisive trenchancy.
— Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. A. Smock)
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— Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. A. Smock)