Month: December 2023

“He that can compose himself, is wiser than he that composes books.” – Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

“You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you.” – Bret Easton Ellis

“Someone once said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” – T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and the arts.” – Benjamin Disraeli

“A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.” – Annie Dillard

“I have become so lonely that only the word is free enough and large enough to take my mind off, the world going day by day over the brink used up but unused…” – A.R. Ammons, The Snow Poems

“The lover of words for their own sake often finds himself in a jungle. There is a great mystery in the way words meet each other in rhymes and puns, like amorous couples of the most diverse origin.” – Harold Acton, Memories of an Aesthete

“I write poetry to investigate myself, and my meaning and meanings.” – LeRoi Jones, Gatsby’s Theory of Aesthetics

“Critics are inclined to think, and have always been inclined to think, that if a poet is popular he must be bad.” – Maurice Baring, Lost Lectures

“Charity, of course, is what the writer supports himself with while he is finishing his novel. Hope is the virtue by which he firmly trusts that someday, somewhere, somebody will publish his novel. But it is in the virtue of faith that the writer grounds himself or herself in the true religious experience of literature.” – William Kennedy, Why It Took So Long