Business is, emphatically, the amusement of Americans, and, to be in keeping with their character, every thing written for their a...musement should partake of the useful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The a...cademy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wasn't born to be a fighter. I was born with a gentle nature, a flexible character and an organism as equilibrated as it is judg...ed hysterical. I shouldn't have been forced to fight constantly and ferociously. The causes I have fought for have invariably been causes that should have been gained by a delicate suggestion. Since they never were, I made myself into a fighter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of a British man's constitution. His thoughts and beauties ar...e so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.--No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to te...ll the truth about people's lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who've been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp-flashy or hustler-slick or because they didn't fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types. I want to lift up some usable truths ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is wort...h the trouble of saying it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »