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I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves.... Indeed every man (sic), in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur

 

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I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion.

 

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This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him.

 

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A. Bronson Alcott:
Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially. You may read selections to sensible women, -- if young the better.

 

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Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.

 

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The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

 

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Aldous Huxley:
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

 

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A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

 

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Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for

 

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Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it

 

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Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

 

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Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.



Denise Levertov:

 

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One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

 

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English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

 

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The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

 

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There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

 

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Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

 

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Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

 

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I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

 

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Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.