Thursday, October 28, 1999
A poem should not mean, but be. Archibald Macleish
Wednesday, October 27, 1999
A poem . . . begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. . . . It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.
Robert Frost
Tuesday, October 26, 1999
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
Chinese proverb
Monday, October 25, 1999
Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.
Jean Rostan
Friday, October 22, 1999
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
Richard M. Nixon
Thursday, October 21, 1999
Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
Oscar Wilde
Wednesday, October 20, 1999
There is a holy, mistaken zeal in politics, as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.
Junius
Tuesday, October 19, 1999
"No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination."
James Joyce
Monday, October 18, 1999
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Friday, October 15, 1999
One definition of man is "an intelligence served by organs."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thursday, October 14, 1999
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
Henry David Thoreau
Wednesday, October 13, 1999
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
Tuesday, October 12, 1999
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world- in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings."
Susan Sontag
Monday, October 11, 1999
For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction. Flannery O'Connor
Friday, October 8, 1999
"Walls are laws to some people, and laws are walls to others." Chaim Potok
Thursday, October 7, 1999
Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Will Rogers
Wednesday, October 6, 1999
His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.
Samuel Beckett
Tuesday, October 5, 1999
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
Ernest Hemingway
Monday, October 4, 1999
A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.
Albert Camus
Friday, October 1, 1999
The novel is the one bright book of life. D.H. Lawrence