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T. S. Eliot Quotes about Writing

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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot
Communication, Writing, Poetry
1929 Dante.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

T. S. Eliot
Witty, Humorous, Writing

If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.

T. S. Eliot
Writing, Bangs, Ends

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

T. S. Eliot
Writing, Poetry, Feelings
T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

T. S. Eliot
Writing, Agony, Trying

Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.

T. S. Eliot
Running, Writing, May

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

T. S. Eliot
Writing, Important, Littles
"Letters of T. S. Eliot. Volume 7: 1934–1935".

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

T. S. Eliot
Art, Writing, Reading Poetry
The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

T. S. Eliot
Writing, Editing, Editors

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

T. S. Eliot
Book, Writing, Silence
T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Rock: A Pageant Play”, p.40, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

T. S. Eliot
Country, Writing, Men
T. S. Eliot (1998). “The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays”, p.28, Courier Corporation

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