Hebrew and Modernity Quotes

“[T]he early diary proves retrospectively to be not only a laboratory for self-exploration but a technical testing-ground for the future writer of fiction. Indeed, for someone with literary ambitions, the two impulses are hard to separate: fictional invention itself is another vehicle of self-knowledge, a way of recasting one's experience under the camouflage of fabulation; and, correspondingly, even so scrupulous an effort to observe what one had undergone as we find in Fogel's diary is also on some level a playing with the possibility of turning it into literature.”
― Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity