Literature Quotes - Page 97

My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me

I've gone on the wagon, but my body doesn't believe it.

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

Even the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Hunger is insolent, and will be fed.

Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters.

False shame accompanies a man that is poor, shame that either harms a man greatly or profits him; shame is with poverty, but confidence with wealth.

Try to take for a mate a person of your own neighborhood.

How easily some light report is set about, but how difficult to bear.

Do not gain basely; base gain is equal to ruin.

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.