Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-c...arrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since film is first visual, and then perhaps laden with intellectual content, the art form it most nearly seems to resemble is pai...nting. But since movies are moving pictures, perhaps sculpture is a better analogy or, since objects are perceived as moving in three dimensions, maybe architecture is better still.... If movies end as architectural objects in motion, they begin as construction projects. Making a movie is more like constructing a building on a vacant lot than like writing a book. The literary property is the lot. The movie is the building. The screenwriter is the architect, the director is the contractor, and the producer is theoretically the owner. The major studio (if one is involved) can represent the lending institution, the equity partner, and/or the leasing agent for the finished building. The artist, if we need to believe one is involved, is likely to be the lawyer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And for the citation of so many authors, 'tis the easiest thing in nature. Find out one of these books with an alphabetical index,... and without any farther ceremony, remove it verbatim into your own ... there are fools enough to be thus drawn into an opinion of the work; at least, such a flourishing train of attendants will give your book a fashionable air, and recommend it for sale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am told that Duclos' book is not in vogue in Paris, and that it is being violently criticized, apparently because readers unders...tand it; and being intelligible is no longer the fashion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a Book By seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light,... On which the eyes of God not rarely look,
A chronicle of actions just and bright-- There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary, shine; And since thou own'st that praise, I spare thee mine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers ...of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame. Only those books come down which deserve to last.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »