Tag Archives: Quotes

Quote

Posted on by
Reply

“Usually I circle around an idea, coming at it from many angles. In the process it seems to me as valid to move from abstraction towards realism and back again as it is for a poet to move from Lyric to Villanelle and back. The process of work being the discovery of the idea. Sometimes an idea which has been inchoate is defined. Sometimes and idea is inchoate–a song or a poem can help to define it. Or hold it in focus.”-Judith Rothschild, 1976 (Judith Rothschild: An Artist’s Search by Jack Flam)

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 3rd-6th June

Posted on by
3
  • Franz Kafka died on 6/3/1924. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” (The Metamorphosis; The Trial; The Castle)
  • Allen Ginsberg was born on 6/3/1926. “I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.” (Howl; Kaddish; September on Jessore Road)
  • Ivy Compton-Burnett was born on 6/5/1884. “Everything is breaking stones, up to a point.” (Pastors and Masters; A House and Its Head; The Present and the Past)
  • Federico García Lorca was born on 6/5/1898. “…I am the immense shadow of my tears.” (Poem of Deep Song; Six Galician poems; First Songs)
  • Stephen Crane died on 6/5/1900. “It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.” (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; The Red Badge of Courage; George’s Mother)
  • O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) died on 6/5/1910. “No friendship is an accident.” (Cabbages and Kings; The Gift of the Magi; The Cop and the Anthem)
  • Pierre Corneille was born on 6/6/1606. “To win without risk is to triumph without glory.” (La Veuve; Le Cid; Rodogune)
  • Thomas Mann was born on 6/6/1875. “It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.” (Buddenbrooks; Tristan; Death in Venice)
Pierre Corneille
Franz Kafka, 1917
Allen Ginsberg
Federico Garcia Lorca, 1914
O. Henry
Stephen Crane, 1899
Thomas Mann, 1881

 

Six Quotes About Writing

Posted on by
5

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”-Anaïs Nin

“Write hard and clear about what hurts”.-Ernest Hemingway

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”-Leonard Cohen

“He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, of jump off a bridge.”-Charles Bukowski

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”-William Faulkner

“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”-Raymond Carver

John Steinbeck Quote

Quote

Posted on by
3

“Consequently I have never even wondered about the comparative standing of writers. I don’t understand that. Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product is turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn’t mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.”-John Steinbeck (Paris Review-The Art of Fiction No. 45)

John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45 [The Paris Review]