After all, the world is not a stage not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not li...ttle theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches ... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles.--That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be.... Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience--let him read someone else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You become a reader because you saw and heard someone you admired enjoying the experience, someone led you to the world of books e...ven before you could read, let you taste the magic of stories, took you to the library, and allowed you to stay up later at night to read in bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood or ...season of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of inno...vative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their po...litical programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe--not empirically, alas, but only theoretically--that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after th...e free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginnin...g to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In middle life each man wrote a long elegiac work centering on the death of someone very near his heart: Tennyson's In Memoriam su...rely corresponds to Brahms' German Requiem.... At the other extreme you will no doubt think of Brahms' fiery Hungarian dances and graceful Viennese waltzes: in the work of Tennyson there are similar pieces, in broad dialect with touches of rough comedy and unbuttoned jollity, in particular "The Northern Farmer." Between these extremes, in the work of each man, lies a single masterpiece, strange but characteristic. Tennyson's Maud is what he calls a monodrama, a set of lyrics spoken by one man, telling the story of tragic love. In 1869 Brahms lost the beautiful Julie Schumann: the result was his famous Alto Rhapsody, an extended lyric, in fact a monodrama on the agonies of loneliness in a heart thirsty for love. The nineteenth century was a nationalist era, so both Brahms and Tennyson wrote pieces we should now call jingoistic: they are seldom played or read today, but they are part of the total picture. For Brahms the best known was his Triumph Song, written after the German conquests of France. For Tennyson, it was "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and other galloping and shouting lyrics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poet can read. A poet can write. A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white... in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writes of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home. How should there be Black poets in America?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »