Author Quotes

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin.

I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it.

I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below.

Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

Action is character.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

There are no second acts in American lives.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.