Wrote Mikhail Bakhtin:

” I must answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life….Art and life are not one, but they must become one in me, in the unity of my responsibility.”

This quote appears in a book review by Gary Saul Morson in the October 2014 issue of The New Criterion.