WORDS, WORDS, WORDS AUTOBIOGRAPHY Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people. Philip Guedalla CRITICISM Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. Samuel Johnson EGO No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted. W.H. Auden LITERATURE Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients. Karl Kraus MOTIVATION If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing. Kingsley Amis POETS In the case of many poets, the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible. T.S. Eliot PUBLISHERS As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with irrational fear of life become publishers. Cyril Connolly REVIEWS The covers of this book are too far apart. Ambrose Bierce ROCK JOURNALISM Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read. Frank Zappa WRITERS One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers. Wilfred Sheed ADVICE TO POLEMICISTS A jerk who knees is better than a knee that jerks. William Safire BIOGRAPHY Biography is often practised as a form of lion-taming without the risks. Graham Robb CRITICISM The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Oscar Wilde CULTURE It is often remarked, but for this reason easily forgotten, that sensitive minds are daily becoming rarer, and cultured minds more commonplace. Stendahl MEMORY AND LITERATURE Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are. Robert Pinsky METAPHORS For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. George Eliot MERIT There is no test of literary merit except survival. Orwell NOVELS The canon of the novel demands that virtuous love be depicted as essentially tedious and uninteresting. ... But all this is a weakness in the art of portrayal and quite unrelated to passion as it exists in nature. Stendahl PROBLEMS Two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artists. Chekhov SYNOPSES I have never mastered the art of composing synopses, a disability which has put me at a disadvantage in a society littered with the corpses of publicly funded artistic expression. Shiva Naipaul TRAVEL WRITING Damn description, it is always disgusting. Byron WRITERS There is at the back of every artist's mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture ... the landscape of his dreams ... This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied. G. K. Chesterton Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dullness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. George Eliot
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