As to "Don Juan," confess ... that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? I...t may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard L...ampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficien...t, philanthropic self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand--a business as safe and commendable as ma...king soap or breakfast foods--or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I read The Sound and the Fury or Middlemarch, I'm filled with the aromas of either book, with past readings and relationships t...o the characters, with a whole continent of language and scenes, but the books don't frighten me. I can enter into their dream songs, and leave at my own will. But if I'm watching Casablanca on the wall, I'll let my eye slip past the phony details, the studio-bound streets, the laughable sense of a fabricated city, and drift into that dream of Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Cafe Americain, which exists outside any laws of physics, like the eternal dream of Hollywood itself, a little dopey, but with a power we can't resist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not ...hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, I know you haven't had much experience writing and none at all in pictures. But I've heard about you. It all sounded like yo...u're just the man I wanted for a story about the Navy. I don't want a story just about ships and planes. I want a story about the officers.... I want this story from a pen dipped in salt water not dry martinis. Do you know what I mean?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out,... And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line... And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »