"These provocations, let's say, usually appear when the literati are fighting prudery and academism of all kinds. They appear as provocations, as acts of bravado meant to change something. Weren't it for these provocations, nothing would ever change, and we would never have had an erotic language in novels or in poetry – it would have remained unacceptable to this day. Certainly, literature cannot turn into a lovemaking guide, of course it must keep a few nooks in the shade. The most interesting erotic novels are those in which a certain Victorian spirit of la belle époque – in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – is still weighing on the liberties that writers have begun to assume."
President of the Romanian Writers' Union, in Jurnalul naţional, October 2005
by Nicolae Manolescu
