Commonplace Book

'One of the advantages of the writer as alien - of the disinherited, disenfranchised or dispossessed - is that whether or not they themselves are great, they can write from some nearness to the open-ended world to which all serious artists aspire. They write from an intellectual and emotional diaspora, from a past which transcends the nostalgias of childhood, and toward a future which apprehends something better than they have. Satire - the worm's eye turning - comes to them naturally, as it does to those without full passport privileges, or else they have the kind of neutral perspective that attaches to small borderland nations. At the same time, they have the furious energy of the repressed.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part IV)