All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor–a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, ‘But suppose you died before all the book was written?’ […] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, ‘One can only work on, you know–work while it is day.”

“You ask me why I don’t speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill’Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it’s how it mends it”

“Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.”

“Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses toSuch things as flowers and song and you;Still as of old his being giveIn Beauty’s name, while she may live,Beauty that may not die as longAs there are flowers and you and song.”

“ ‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.”

“The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous – no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature – irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.”

“I believe that to be the world’s greatest livingwriterthere must be somethingterribly wrong with you.I don’t even want to be the world’s greatestdead writer.just being dead would be fairenough.”

“The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.”

“How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.”

“If I’m still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre–the poems, the poems!–in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac’s horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford’s poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it’s all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.”

“Everything has its poetry. 94”

“And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter.”

“Literature is the ditch I’m going to die in. It’s still the thing I care most about.”

“Saki says that youth is like hors d’oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don’t notice it. When you’ve had them, you wish you’d had more hors d’oeuvres.”

“Dear, I can’t write, it’s all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.”