“For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things”

— Paul Auster