As I started to write The Book of Questions, I got the impression that the culture I had relied on so far was violently cracking up. At any rate, I felt that it was no longer able to channel the anxieties I was harbouring. I no longer belonged – and foresaw that I would have to ground my writing in this not-belonging. Ragged phrases, shards of dialogues slowly surfaced – but as if from an anterior memory. Without knowing it, I was listening to a book rejecting all books and which I obviously did not master. I was interrogating this book even as I was writing it, expecting that it would create itself through the interrogation itself. But was it one book or were there innumerable books inside the book, from which its form, its ruptures, come? In a way I had to track the book beyond its ruptures, to where it has no longer any belonging or place or resemblance, where therefore it escapes all categories and traditions.

Edmund Jabès (link), translated by Pierre Joris.