quotes from classic

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

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People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

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When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

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I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

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Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

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Wars are made to make debt.

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If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

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I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

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Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

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One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

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Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

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We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

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And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

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Literature is news that stays news.

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If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

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Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

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When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder.

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But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

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