| No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. |
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-- Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
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| It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at only one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends. |
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-- Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
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| The
value of a book is not in the book, it is in the
subsequent behavior of its readers. |
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-- Wendell
Johnson, People in Quandaries
(New York: Harper and Bros., 1946), p. 206
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| There
is no substitute for critical tradition: a continuum
of understanding, early commenced. . . . Precisely
because William Blake's contemporaries did not know
what to make of him, we do not know either, though
critic after critic appeases our sense of obligation
to his genius by reinventing him. . . . In the 1920s,
on the other hand, something was immediately made
of Ulysses and "The Waste Land,"
and our comfort with both works after 50 years,
including our ease at allowing for their age, seems
derivable from the fact that they have never been
ignored. |
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-- Hugh
Kenner, The Pound Era
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1971), p. 415.
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| The
crucial art of the essay lies in its perpetrator's
masterful control over his own self-exposure. .
. . He must be the ringmaster of his self-display. |
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-- Wendy
Lesser, The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1999)
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| Freedom
is always the freedom for others to think differently. |
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-- Rosa
Luxembourg
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| A
writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult
than it is for other people. |
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-- Thomas
Mann
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| All
action is a form of speech. Language is the shape
life takes passing through us; it is how we pay
homage to things and preserve them. What one works
toward is this: that there be no difference between
the man, the life, the voice, that all become a
way of standing in the world, a kind of witness. |
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-- Peter
Marin, In a Man's Time
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974)
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