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From the book “The Consolation of Objects“:

Until I was twenty-two, I drew and painted a lot, because I wanted to become a painter. I eventually became a writer, but I never stopped thinking about the relationship between painting and literature. From 2009 to 2013, I taught a seminar at Columbia University in New York in which we tried to get to the bottom of this relationship. The students simply called it “Words and Images.”

In the seminar, I placed particular emphasis on the text by Horace (65–8 BCE) known as Ars Poetica, from which comes the quotation “ut pictora poesis” (as painting is, so is poetry). It was very important to me that my students become familiar with this most famous text on the comparison between painting and literature: “Poetry resembles painting. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over.”