"Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book. Not like a dead city of stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a tilled field, but then a spiritual field: like a spiritual tree, let me rather say, it stands from year to year, and from age to age (we have Books that already number some hundred-and-fifty human ages); and yearly comes its new produce of leaves (Commentaries, Deductions, Political Systems; or were it only Sermons, Pamphlets, Journalistic essays), every one of which is talsimatic and thaumaturgic, for it can persuade men. . . . O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder. . . .thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing city of the mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim." Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

"It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever." Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

"And one of the royal house of Hanover, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (brother of George III), on hearing that the greatest living English historian had produced another volume, summed it up in an immortal piece of author-squelching: 'Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gibbon?'"-Gilbert Highet, How to Torture an Author

"Who will give to the historian as much as he gives to the man who reads out the news?" --Juvenal, Satires

"Oh lord its easier to write history than to make it, even in such a mild way as mine."--D.H. Lawrence, Letters of D.H. Lawrence

"In the case of a great writer like Juvenal, who writes for all time, each generation seems to demand a translation of its own, in accordance with the changes in its own point of view and the shifting usages of language; and each translator desires to bring out in his own way the special meaning which the author has conveyed to him." --G.G. Ramsay, Preface to Juvenal and Perseus.

"But of course in [Herodotus's] day the unknown was so great, and what was actually known was so limited, no borderline had yet been drawn between the credible and the incredible. It is often impossible to make out why Herodotus accepts one thing and rejects another purely on the ground of what can and cannot happen. Doves, he says firmly, do not ever speak even though the holy women at Dodonoa declare that they do--but he does not question the story that a mare gave birth to a rabbit." Edith Hamilton, The Great Age of Greek Literature

"So very difficult a matter it is to trace and find out the truth of anything by history, when, on the one hand, those who afterward write it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through envy and ill-will, partly through favor and flattery, pervert and distort truth." Plutarch

" The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. . . . There are at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all wise men . . . The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seeks the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense that common use permits us out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. . . . It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you only learn some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations." --Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

"Man's life and nature is as it was and ever shall be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things, and a heart to undertand them, or they come and pass away before him in vain. . . [Robert Burns] . . . does not write from hearsay, but from sight and experience; it is the scenes that he has lived and labored amidst that he describes. These scenes, rude and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, noble thought and definite resolves, and he speaks forth what is in him not from any outward call of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it with such melody and modulation as he can... this is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others be first moved and convinced himself." Thomas Carlyle, An Essay on Robert Burns.

". . . so, poetry, by taking up its themes from philosophy and blending them with fable, renders the task of learning light and agreeable for the young." Plutarch, How To Study Poetry.

"Our older writers were lovers of language; they were fine gentlemen, even dandies sometimes in their use of words; they read old books and studied dictionaries in their search for apt expressions, and now and then on their pages we would be pleased to see some ancient, primitive word appear with its face washed and its eyes again shining . . . One might also come on one of those unexpected encounters of familiar words in which Emerson said the art of writing consisted, or be enchanted by those longer phrases which possess a kind of magic--phrases either written with care and deliberation as by Sir Thomas Browne, or Pater, or sparkling sometimes unexpectedly like those waves which break into little gleams of foam on the ripple of Thackery's easy prose." Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years

"The grand style arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject." Matthew Arnold, Last Words on Translating Homer.

". . . for the style is the expression of the nobility of the poet's character, as the matter is the expression of the richness of his mind: but on men character produces as great an effect as mind." Matthew Arnold, letter to Arthur Hugh Clough September, 1848.

". . . But the difference between Herodotus and Sophocles is that the former sought all over the world's surface for that interest the latter found within man." --Matthew Arnold.

"Il dit tout ce qu'il veut, mais malheureusement il n'a rien à dire." ["He says all he wants but unfortunately he has nothing to say."] --Matthew Arnold on a modern author.

"With an inward smile I reflected, that the most ignorant are ever the most audacious and the most ready to rush into print." --Spinoza, letter to Jareg Ellis

"Inherent in the [pre-Internet publishing] principle of one-to-many was the notion that some people were more worth listening to than others, and the role of a civilized society should be to make sure those exceptional people were heard, while the stupid people were kept as quiet as possible. . . " --John Seabrook [reporting on two years spent on a computer in cyberspace]

 "I do by no means advise you to throw away your time in ransacking, like a dull antiquarian, the minute and important parts of remote and fabulous times. Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote." --Earl of Chesterfield, Letters and Maxims of Lord Chesterfield.

 "Metaphors must be drawn, as has been said already, from things that are related to the original thing, and yet not obviously so related-- just as in philosophy also an acute mind will perceive resemblances even in things far apart." Aristotle, Rhetoric.

--David Morton

"Dear Robert, Your letters are charming, they are irridescent, and everything you see or hear seems to become touched with color, and tinged with joy." --Oscar Wilde, letter to Robert Ross, July 1889.

"Between me and life there is a mist of words always, I throw probability out the window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth." --Oscar Wilde, letter to Arthur Conan Doyle, April 1891.

"I don't think I shall write again; la joie de vivre is gone, and that, with will-power, is the basis of Art."--Oscar Wilde, letter to Carlos Blacker, 9 March 1898.

"The poetic gift is indeed seldom united with the gift of managing life, and making good any adequate position." Goethe, letter to Thomas Carlyle, 25 June 1829.

"My dear Miss Singleton, I think the sonnet is quite clear as it stands. No lover could miss the allusion to the old proverb about the gorse and kissing time, and it is only for lovers that poets write. Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art." --Oscar Wilde, letter to Violet Fane, 24 October 1887.

"[T]o write prose, one must have something to say; but he who has nothing to say can still make verses and rhymes, where one word suggests another, and at last something comes out, which in fact is nothing, but looks as if it were something. [As to deliberate obscurity, the writer Hinrichs "unfortunately" fell under the spell of Hegel and writes in so] "artificial and heavy a style, both of thought and expression, that we find passages in his book where our understanding comes to a standstill, and we no longer know what we are reading." Conversations of Goethe

"It has seemed well, you note, to imitate the rhetoricians of our time, who believe themselves absolute gods if they can show themselves bilingual (like horse-leeches), and account it a famous feat if they can weave in a few Greekish words, like inlay work, ever and anon into their Latin orations . . . if they want exotic touches, they dig four or five obsolete words out of decaying manuscripts, by which they spread darkness over the reader; with the idea, I warrant you, that those who understand will be vastly pleased with themslves, and those who do not understand will admire all the more. . . ." Erasmus, In Praise of Folly.

We may not clarify a subject when we give it a special name, but perhaps, in the eyes of some, we give it added dignity, if the name selected is a hard one." --Judge Benjamin Cardozo, The Growth of the Law.

"We are now surfeited with mini-Lacans and mock-Foucaults. To write direct prose, lucid and open to comprehension, using common language, is to lose face . . . Language does not clarify; it intimidates. It subjects the reader to a rite of passage and extorts assent as the price of entry. For the savant's thought is so radically original that ordinary words will not do. Its newness requires neologism; it seeks rupture, overgeneralization, oracular pronouncements and a pervasive tone of apocalyptic hype." --Robert Hughes, in Nothing If Not Critical

"It is very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that what one does not quite understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From this there is only a little step to setting down one's impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can always be found to discover a hidden sense in them . . . . There is another form of wilfull obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the vulgar may not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not only pretentious; it is short-sighted . . . . time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage no one would think of reading; or occasionally it throws a sharp cold light on what had seemed profound and thus discloses the fact that these contortions of language disguised very commonplace notions." W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

"When I began to write I did so as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I took to it as a duck takes to water. I have never quite got over my astonishment at being a writer; there seems no reason for my having become one except and irresistable inclination, and I do not see why such an inclination should have arisen in me. . . . I have never had more than two English lessons in my life, for though I wrote essays at school, I do not remember that I ever received any instruction on how to put sentences together." W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up [but he goes on to say that he traveled and learned German, French, Italian and Russian, tried Greek, and deliberately read all the best writers he could get and modeled his sentences after theirs, copying out whole passages and memorizing them, and then experimenting with altering their wording.]

"Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can wrote a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to . . . . The language is alive and constantly changing; to try to write like the authors of a distant past can only give rise to artificiality." W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up.

"The fact that I had four plays running at once brought me great notoriety. . . My success was spectacular and unexpected. . . . I think the secret of playwriting can be given in two maxims: stick to the point and whenever you can, cut." W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

[Early on]"[r]ichness of texture was sought by means of a jewelled phrase and sentences stiff with exotic epithets: the ideal was a brocade so heavy with gold that it stood up by itself. [But ] on taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony. [Yet, Colette, he was surprised to discover when he asked her] "gets the effect of ease [because she] wrote everything over and over again." W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

"Might Updike not have allowed one blind noun to slip free of its seeing-eye adjective?" Gore Vidal, Rabbit's Own Burro

"Every novelist has been visited by the insinuating wraiths of false 'good situations,' siren-objects luring his cockle-shell to the rocks; their voice is oftenest heard, and their mirror-sea beheld, as he traverses the waterless desert which awaits him halfway through whatever work is actually in hand. I knew well enough what song these sirens sang, and had often tied myself to my dull job until they were out of hearing--perhaps carrying a lost masterpiece in their rainbow veils. But I had no such fear of them in the case of Ethan Frome. It was the first subject I had ever approached with full confidence in its value, for my own purpose, and a relative faith in my power to render at least a part of what I saw in it." Edith Wharton, Introduction to Ethan Frome

"Isherwood and I met on the doorstep. He is a slip of a wild boy, with quicksilver eyes: nipped; jockeylike. 'That young man,' said W. Maugham, 'holds the future of the English novel in his hands.' Very enthusiastic." A Writer's Diary-- Virginia Woolf

"[O]ne of the best tips for writing a play is, 'Never let them sit down' --i.e. keep the characters buzzing about without a pause. . . The more I write the more I am convinced that the only way to write a popular story is to split it up into scenes, and have as little stuff between the scenes as possible. . . . Did you read Kipling's autobiography? In that he maintains that the principal thing in writing is to cut. Somerset Maugham says the same. Kipling says its like raking slag out of a fire to make it burn brighter. I know just what he means." --P.G. Wodehouse, letters

"Have you ever considered how difficult it is to select a pseudonym? Now that I may have to, I can think of no name that sounds like anything. My mind dwells on things like Eustace Trevelyn . . . I think the thing is to combine two actual names--such as Reeves Grimsdick." --P.G. Wodehouse to William Townsend, August 16 1934.

"I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing', and those who do that --humorists they are sometimes called-- are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at. When I tell you that in a recent issue of the New Yorker I was referred to as that 'burbling pixie,' you will see how far the evil has spread. . . Of course the bright side is that more and more critics are becoming ignored and will shortly disappear altogether. . . . Until this golden age sets in, if it ever does, I shall have to resign myself to the obscurity which is the fate of light writers. Not that I mind it . . . " --P.G. Wodehouse, letters.

"When The Sword In The Stone first appeared, in 1937, it had a big critics' success, columns being written about it and in raise of it. But, mark this, the way the critics told its story and their damned pomposity not only gave me no idea of the merits of the book but put me right off it. . . what I want to know is, Is one missing lots of good books simply through the fatheadedness of reviewers? Can't these blighters even put across the books they like? " P.G. Wodehouse letter to Denis Mackail, April 20, 1946.

"I have just finished a sort of autobiography. It is really a peg on which to hang my Punch articles. But what I am leading up to is what infernally dull reading an author's life makes. It's all right as long as you are struggling, but once you have become financially sound there is nothing to say. . . The fact is, practically every author is a damned amateur. They have one good book in them and can't repeat." P.G. Wodehouse letters to Denis Mackail

"Blandings is purely imaginary, but I composed it I suppose, of a number of country houses I visited as a child. My parents were in Hong Kong most of the time, and I was left in charge of various aunts, many of them vicar's wives who paid occasional calls on the local great House, taking me with them. Why, I can't imagine, as I had no social gifts. But those visits made me familiar with life in the Servant's Hall, as I was usually sent there in the custody of the butler, to be called for later." P.G. Wodehouse letter to Richard Usborne

"Harry, who had all a crow's quickness in finding a wound to pick at, discovered our trouble and teased us unmercifully . . . . Myself I was beaten regularly . . . . If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day's doings (especially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction is set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture--religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literature." Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself--For My Friends Known And Unknown

arche de toi hemisou pantos-- [The beginning is half of everything.]--Greek maxim, cited by Aristotle in the Ethics.

"Socrates: [I]f he began in error, he may have forced the rest into agreement with the original error and with himself. There would be nothing strange in this, any more than in geometric diagrams, which have often a slight and invisible flaw in the first part of the process, and are consistently mistaken in the long deductions which follow. And that is why every man should expend his first thought and attention on consideration of the first principles--are they or are they not rightly laid down?" --Plato, Cratylus

"The expression 'writing between the lines' expresses the subject of this article. For the influence of persecution on literature is precisely that it compells all writers who hold heterodox views to develop a peculiar technique of writing, the technique we have in mind when we speak of writing betweeen the lines . . [If writing against the governing beliefs of a totalitarian regime a writer would start with a long-winded exposition of the innocuous;] only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think . . . The fact which makes this literature possible is the axiom that thoughtless men are careless readers, and only thoughtful men are careful readers." --Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing

"A speech has two parts. You must state your case, and you must prove it . . . The tragic poets, too, let us know the pivot of their play; if not at the outset like Euripides, at least somewhere in the preface to a speech, like Sophocles. . . what you should do in your introduction is to state your subject, in order that the point to be judged may be quite plain; in the epilogue you should summarize the arguments by which your case has been proved." Aristotle, Rhetoric

"Here is an odd thing worth remembering: we appreciate the last works of artists and the pictures they leave unfinished more than their completed works . . . This is because in them we still see traces of the drawing and catch the thought of the artist unawares." --Pliny

"As you know, the last subject of any conversation is always the main point." --Richard M. Nixon

"What pleases the crowd spreads itself over a limitless field, and, as we already see, meets approval in all countries and all regions. The serious and intellectual meets with less success, but those who are devoted to higher and more profitable things will learn to know each other more intimately and more quickly." --Goethe, Theory of a World Literature.

"Within the past few years, two acquaintances, roughly my contemporaries, have written books that have made millions of dollars. Despite the fact that my most recent royalty check was $2.49, I did not feel the least wisp of envy for either of these fellows; nor do I now. . . . [F]or my own writing, posterity and not prosperity is the name of my (slightly embarassing to admit) desire; and rather than widespread fame, I prefer to have a good name among a select audience of the genuinely thoughtful.. . [M]eanwhile my own problem, I begin to realize, is that I am becoming more discriminating in my envy. What I am discriminating against is the world's larger, more obvious prizes: wealth, fame, power. Glittering though these prizes are, and as they once were to me, I now find them mainly glaring, and in my own life even a little beside the point. I still envy large things, among them genuine achievement, true religious faith, real erudition." --Jospeh Epstein, A Few Kind Words for Envy.

"Also [Lord] Acton was lonely. He had no reliable audience close to his mind and voice. He said himself that he 'had never had any contemporaries.' Books must be written for someone, aimed at a person or group, real or ideal. It was only toward the end of his life, when he became a professor, that he came to understand whom he should address and what he ought to tell them. It is touching to see him beginning his inaugural lecture, not with the conventional 'Gentlemen,' but with the more modest and friendly 'Fellow students.'" Gilbert Highet, An Unwritten Book.

"I think he has treated his theme in a masterly manner, and displays that thorough knowledge of his subject--which is only to be obtained by experience." Herman Melville, letter to Peter Gansevoort, Dec 31 1837.

[Redburn and White Jacket] are two jobs, which I have done for money--being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood . . . So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to 'fail.' ---Pardon this egoism. . . .The book [Typee] is certainly calculated for popular reading, or for none at all. " Herman Melville, letters to John Murray and to Judge Lemuel Shaw.

"This I see in Mr. Emerson. And frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; --then I had rather be a fool than a wise man. ---I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will. I'm not talking of Mr. Emerson now--but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began." Herman Melville to Evert A. Duyckinck, March 3 1849.

[of Moby Dick, then in progress:] " . . . blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree--& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, from which the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. . . . . . a Polar wind blows through it & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book---on risk of lumbago and sciatics." Herman Melville letters to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. May 1, 1850 and to to Sarayh Huyler Morewood, September 12 1851.

"I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship's cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house & I had better go on the roof and rig in the chimney." Herman Melville letter to Evert A. Duykinck, 13 December 1850.

"Your incoherent ravings may be continued if you choose; they remind me of the croakings of a vulture disappointed of its prey." Herman Melville, letter to a critical Editor, Albany Microscope, March 31 1838.

"The wise writer . . . writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next and the school-masters of ever afterward," [declared F. Scott Fitzgerald in a mock-interview with himself after his first novel was published, at age 24. He later repeated the remark to the American Bookseller's Convention].

"Serious writers ought to be able to write what they want to write. But professional writers write for publication. Otherwise they are hobbyists. . . .I can't reduce our scale of living and I can't stand this financial insecurity. Anyhow there's no point in trying to be an artist if you can't do your best." --F Scott Fitzgerald letters to Maxwell Perkin.

[How to get published:] "This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris (an American) writes for the Transatlantic Review and has a brilliant future." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to his editor at Scirbners, Max Perkins.

"Don't be at all discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one." F. Scott Fitzgerald letter to his daughter Scottie, Oct. 20, 1936.

"But you can't blame the liars because all a writer of fiction is really is a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men. I am a writer of fiction and so I am a liar too and invent from what I now and that I've heard. I'm a liar . . . My excuse is that I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be. That is what makes good writers or bad." --Ernest Hemingway.

"Once when Hemingway wrote in one of his stories that Gertrude Stein always knew what was good in a Cézanne, she looked at him and said, Hemingway, remarks are not literature." Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas.

[Comparing Allen Tate to Gertrude Stein:] "You succeed much better than she in accomplishing what is her avowed aim--to split up lyrical or picture-word sequences into pieces in the same way that Cubists do in painting. She is entertaining only at the expense of all coherence, whereas you break things up into sharp impressions and also preserve the outlines of the scattered pieces" Hart Crane, Letters

"The poetry of negation is beautiful--alas, too dangerously so for one of my mind. But I am trying to break away from it. Perhaps this is useless, perhaps it is silly--but one does have joys. The vocabulary of damnations and prostrations has been developed at the expense of these other moods, however, so that it is hard to dance in proper measure. Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!" Hart Crane, letter to Allen Tate May 16, 1922.

"It was the pace and attack of the writing that was important to [Kerouac]. He wanted his writing to embody the rush of energy rather than to describe it in the detached voice of the observer. . . Drugs were a way of bringing this about. He wanted the 'uninhibited' subconscious to make itself known, and to bypass the censoring tactics of the conscious mind." Steve Turner [Keroac biographer]

Mrs. Astor having a bohemian party at the suggestion of Harry Lehr, when asked who would she invite as the bohemian element, said: 'Why, Edith Wharton and J. P. Morgan.'" Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children

"I remember once saying that I was a failure in Boston . . because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable. An amusing instance of this took place not long after my first book came out . . . One of New York's most fashionable hostesses had, rather apologetically, invited [a friend of mine] to dine 'with a few people who write.' 'It will be rather Bohemian, I'm afraid,' the inviter added, 'but they say one ought to see something of these people.' 'Oh what fun! Who do you suppose they'll be? I exulted, racking my brains to guess how our hostess, who was my cousin, could have made the acquaintance of the very people who I longed to know. . . ' We assembled in the ornate drawing room. . . and I discovered that the Bohemians were my old friend Eliot Gregory (who had the audacity to write an occasional article in a review or daily paper), George Smalley, the New York correspondent of the London Times--and myself!" --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward

"In the interval two things had happened: Henry James had taken the measure of the fashionable society which in youth had subjugated his imagination, as it had Balzac's, and was later to subjugate Proust's, and had fled from it to live in the country, carrying with him all the loot his adventures could yield; and in his new solitude he had come to grips with his genius. . . .[in France] James' social gifts, and keen enjoyment of society (once he had escaped from its tyrannous routine) lent a school-boy zest to his Paris visits. . . . Peter Dunne was floundering helplessly in the heavy seas of James' parentheses"--Edith Wharton, Looking Backward

"I took particular pleasure at having made Proust known to James. 'But in this, after all, he merely exemplified the tendency not infrequent by novelists of manners--Balzac and Thakeray among them--to be dazzled by contact with the very society they satirize." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward

"[As a writer] it was good to be turned from a drifting amateur into a professional; but that was nothing compared to the effect on my imagination of systematic daily effort. I was really like Saul the son of Kish, who went out to find an ass, and came back with a kingdom: the kingdom of mastery over my tools." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward

"What we are looking for in life is wisdom. If you understand what wisdom is, you can pick up any book in any bookstore and within two minutes figure out whether the book you are holding contains any wisdom. Wisdom as opposed to knowledge and facts." Lee Atwater [who in fact had read only the Cliff Notes version of Plato's Republic.]

"Wisdom, I know, is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival." Jefferson to Abigail Adams [about his difficulty choosing gift figurines for her.]

"Because lyric poetry is so good at human interpretation of the raw loose universe, we are all the more disappointed when poets shirk, when they bait their hooks with tidbits and fish for small fry in their backyards. Very often poets limit their take of the actual to wee private moments the significance of which they assert on only personal grounds. It is a shame that poetry has decayed to such sensory self-indulgence that it has abdicated that task to which it is so well and uniquely suited." Annie Dillard, Living By Fiction

"Why read fiction to think about the world? . . . You may, I say, enjoy fiction for those sensations, and turn to nonfiction for thought. . . . fiction, as a field, is not entirely the perogative of specialists. . . . fiction, even when it is literature, should answer to its audience by pleasing it. . . . [But] [s]o long as publishing is an industry among industries, the prestige of whose executives depends upon profits, it will wish to publish literature, especially very original literature, only as an expensive, if beloved, hobby . . . Fortunately the prestige of publishing executives still depends a little bit on the quality of their lists. . . . If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself. " Annie Dillard, Living By Fiction

"The absence of plot from the modern novel is often commented on, like the absence of characters. But nobody has called attention to the disappearance of another element, as though nobody missed it. We have almost forgotten that descriptions of sunsets, storms, rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys used to be one of the staple ingredients of fiction, not merely a painted backdrop for the action but a component evidently held to be necessary for the art." Mary McCarthy

"[George Orwell] was not a natural novelist, having no interest in character or in the process of rising or sinking in ordinary society or in a field of work--a process that engaged the sympathies not just of Proust or Balzac, but of Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Zola, Dickens, Dresier." Mary McCarthy

"You can make an effective short story, as Kipling so often dies, about someone's scoring off somebody else; but this is not enough for a great novelist, who must show us large social forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or antagonistic impulses of the human spirit, struggling with one another." --Edmund Wilson

"But there is little affection for the life principle in The Naked Lunch, and sex, while magnified a common trait of homosexual literature is a kind of mechanical man-trap baited with fresh meat. The sexual climax, the jet of sperm, accompanied by a whistling scream, is often a death spasm, and the perfect orgasm would seem to be the posthumous orgasm of the hanged man, shooting his jism into pure space." Mary McCarthy

". . . now gay fiction was assigned its two shelves in a few stores, and no heterosexual would venture to browse there, just as no man would leaf through a book shelved under 'Feminism.' . . . The category of general literary fiction was vanishing, and its disappearance showed that the new multiculturalism was less a general conversation than rival monologues." Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony

"The last few years of Tennessee Williams' life were not made happier by the demands of gay militants who thought it imperative that our country's only great playwright should dedicate himself exclusively in his plays to gay characters and situations. I admired his response to this dull bigotry: 'Why should I limit my audience any more than it is already?'" --Gore Vidal

"There are more novelists in England than there are novel readers. I was commenting then that film had taken over and was the preferred artform of this period, and that the novel has now joined poetry as something well worth doing for its own sake, but it no longer has a great public, it's no longer essential. The film director has taken the place of the novelist. I said to an interviewer not long ago, 'You know, I used to be a famous novelist.' He said, 'Oh, well, you're still well-known. People read you.' I said, 'I'm not talking about me specifically. My category has vanished.' Saying you're a very famous novelist is like saying you're a famous ceramicist - maybe a good ceramicist or a successful ceramicist, but famous? That was lost on our watch, Norman [Mailer] and I. So is the whole notion of the great writer who sort of spoke for his time." Gore Vidal

"Later, as we walked about the lot and I told him that I hoped to get a job as a writer at the studio since I could no longer live on my royalties as a novelist and would not teach, Christopher [Isherwood] gave me a melancholy look as those bright even harsh blue eyes can affect. 'Don't,' he said with great intensity, posing against the train beneath whose wheels Greta Garbo as Anna Kerenina made her last dive, 'become a hack like me.' But we both knew this was play-acting. . . . . he had been able to write to order for movies while never ceasing to do his own work in his own way. Those whom Hollywood destroyed were never worth saving." Gore Vidal

"It is not, obviously, that Pasternak is afraid of either action or emotion, for the . . . the strength of poetry is to say, or suggest, the unsayable. And the more I worked on this script the more I came to think that Pasternak's book was less an ordinary novel than a disguised poem. His loyalty to the truth--that is, to the irreducibly painful confusion of our experience when we do not shield ourselves from it--made him impatient of narrative logic. . . In drawing a film from a novel you cannot flip over the pages, extracting the important bits and stringing them together. You must think about the book until you feel you know the story, know the characters and the author's intention, and then you must shut the book and write your film. . . .The fourth and most important difference between a novel and a film (or play) is that when the reader tires of a novel he can mark his place, put it down, and return to it later. But the attention of the audience must be held continuously. There must be an unbroken progression. It may be a progression of the emotion or the thought of the action, but emotion and thought must issue in action or threaten to. " --Robert Bolt, Doctor Zhivago, The Screenplay.

". . . many a good book of essays has grown out of a collection of 'commonplaces,' pithy generalizations or memorable sayings copied from different authors. [Keeping such a commonplace book] is a most valuable habit, a perpetual self-education, commended to us by the examples of great men such as Jefferson. . . . And we console ourselves by remembering those who wrote the books were not so wise or successful as the books they wrote. Bacon advises us to save half our income o keep level and two thirds to grow rich; but he himself was wildly extravagant and died in debt. He preaches caution and care, and the long view; but he was impeached for corruption which he himself explained as 'frailty' rather than depravity; that is he wished to seem a fool rather than a scoundrel. La Rouchefoucauld did not begin setting down his maxims until he was a beaten man: he took the losing side in a civil war, was defeated, outwitted, and impoverished." Gilbert Highet [I would add to Highet's list of failed admonitions that Lord Chesterfield's son proved to be a wastrel.]

 "Always verify your references, sir." [--An Oxford Don, when asked what was the single greatest wisdom he had learned in his long life as a scholar. Cited by Gilbert Highet].

"When Plotinus had written anything he could never bear to go over it twice, even to read it through once was too much for him, as his eyesight did not serve him well for reading. In writing he did not form the letters with any regard to appearance or divide his syllables correctly, and he paid no attention to spelling. He was wholly concerned with thought; and, which surprised us all, he went on in this way right up to the end." --Porphyry, On the Life of Plotinus.

"Careless proofreading is not uncommon, and writers differ in their interest and skill in handling such details. It has been said that F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise is an 'inexcusably sloppy job, and the blame must be distributed between author and publisher;' the first edition contained a large umber of misspellings, inconsistencies, and other examples of carelessness which neither the author nor the publisher corrected--indeed some of the errors note by reviewers in 1920 have not yet been corrected." James Thorpe, The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism

"Now the fact is, as we well know, that of all our metrical structures the blank verse is the most difficult to use with success, and of all the English only five or six writers have ever succeeded in it, namely, Shakespear, Milton, Young, Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth. The newspapers and albums are filled with essays on all subjects written in blank verse. It is mere metrical prose. We feel as we read, that these thoughts were conceived in prose, and after turned laboriously by cutting off syllables and substituting worse words, into verse. But in Shakespeare we are sensible instantly that the thought first took form in his melodious form, that the sentence was born Poetry, according to Milton's fine definition of poetry, 'thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers' . . . . One page of Shakespear does not repeat the words of the last page. His rich vocabulary searches all the provinces of language, the court, the camp, the farms, the sea, the market, for every phrase and term of strength or delicacy. His peddler gabbles, his statesman mystifies, his hero thunders, his fool puns, his maiden pleads, each perfect in their dialect, and new supernatural beings are introduced, like Caliban, for whom he devised a new language." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Shakespear

"Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male of female. . . . In 1977, President Billy Carter, on a trip to Poland, wanted to say to the people 'I wish to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future,' but his interpreter made it come out 'I desire Poland carnally. . . .' Yuchatan means in Mexico 'what?' or 'what are you saying?' the reply given by the natives to the first Conquistadores to fetch up on their shores." -Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue: English And How It Got That Way.

"English" [Monsieur Platon] said, pointing accusingly to the innocent words, "is simply French badly spelt.'" --Irwin Edman, Philosopher's Holiday

"We know that Cicero himself did not habitually use formal literary Latin in everyday speech. The uneducated stratum of Roman society would have understood it to a degree but would have spoken a much simpler variety of Latin, one less bound by rules and very receptive of new elements. This dialect is called Vulgar Latin (from vulgus-- mob). It was this, not Classical Latin, that subsequently developed into the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian . . . )" Gavin Betts, Latin

"Dictionaries are but the depositaries of words already legitimized by usage. Society is the work-shop in which new ones are elaborated." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Adams, Aug. 15, 1820.

-- Grace Crowell