The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuatio...n or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the single...ness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as... a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We're a Madison Avenue country. I'm not sure that we make a distinction between newspeople and celebrities. And I think there is a... distinction. The distinction lies in what you do every day--and what you do to get stories and how far you will go and how much you will dig for them. All the rest of the attention that comes to you because you're on the air seems to me an irrelevance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »