Art & Creativity Quote by Mak Dizdar

There is a kind of artistic arrogance here, but it is the earned kind: not vanity, but severity. Mak Dizdar reduces a literary career to a brutal standard of selection. "I haven't written much" is not apology; it is a quiet declaration of discipline. In a culture that often equates seriousness with bulk, Dizdar proposes the opposite: the fewer the poems, the less room there is for waste, repetition, self-indulgence.

What gives the line its charge is the turn in the middle. "It seems to me that I have written well" sounds almost modest, yet it is actually a precise form of self-assessment. He is neither grandstanding nor performing false humility. He grants himself quality, but only provisionally, only enough to set up the final ambition: "I would like to write even less. And even better". That last phrase sharpens the whole statement into an aesthetic manifesto. The ideal is not productivity. It is compression, refinement, the stripping away of everything unnecessary until only the indispensable remains.

That sensibility fits Dizdar's place in literature. As a Bosnian poet writing out of a dense historical and cultural inheritance, he was drawn to language with the force of inscription: carved, concentrated, durable. The quote reads like a defense of permanence against abundance. Its deeper subtext is almost ethical. To write less is to respect language enough not to flood it with weaker work. To write better is to treat poetry not as expression on demand, but as something that must justify its existence.