That complete statement which is literature.
Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.
We shall be the mouthpieces of the divine spirit –.
I like to have space to spread my mind out in.
Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.
Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.
I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it.
The artist after all is a solitary being.
There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.
I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?
We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.
Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.
O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one’s life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.
One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.
What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.