Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is w...ord-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of... comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote the...m.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doc...trine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve hi...s writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is ...because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all... right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »