That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. Steven Millhauser
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In his essay “That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness…” the author, Tom Robbins, describes a particular weekend he had spent with an author named Robert Creeley. In this essay, Robbins talks about how Creeley came up with the idea for a book with a specific theme and how he used a different method of writing to create a piece of artwork instead of using conventional themes. According to Robbins, Creeley’s use of this form didn’t work as well as he hoped but it did more than that.

Source: Dangerous Laughter

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