When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good.
Robert DessaixI am coming from an older school, and I feel that you must learn to wait. There is that essay which was about the great notion of sitting on the mountain and waiting for the muses to cross the stream, and give you the symbols that would allow you to create. The word wait seems to me to be terribly important.
Robert DessaixI think that in this globalised world, the local is going to become more and more important - it is a paradox. You see it in Western Europe more and more. Eastern Europe is still coming out of the Soviet uniform cultural era, but this kind of separation and nationalism is very obvious now in Western Europe.
Robert DessaixYou turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.
Robert DessaixYou are obviously writing out of experience and so the boundaries are always blurred, it is just that sometimes it would seem that you are playing with fire a little bit by choosing someone that obviously existed.
Robert DessaixThere is a mental space that we consciously makes our way back to, and give honour to what has formed us in this mental homeland which we carry with us always. It is important not to try to annihilate it but to take your courage in your hands and go back, and then I think you can more easily make a new beginning. A lot of us would like to know how to do this.
Robert Dessaix