I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts [in her journal], at the very moment--my opinion of people when I... first see them, and how I alter, or how confirm myself in it--and I am much deceived in my foresight, if I shall not have very great delight in reading this living proof of my manner of passing my time, my sentiments, my thoughts of people I know, and a thousand other things in future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,... and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experie...nce of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, "I want you to love her, too!" It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of ne...ws or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the hi...gh fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share--black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.... The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the course of writing one historical book or another, it has happened that I could hardly restrain myself from simply copying e...ntire documents. Indeed, I sometimes sank down among the documents and said to myself, I can't improve on these.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »