To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872
Archive
Quotes
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
—Frank Zappa, c. 1975Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955