Jean-Paul Sartre

My vocation [his sense, as a child, that he would be a writer] changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance had made me a man, generosity would make me a book.

—Jean-Paul Sartre (quoted in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift)