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"The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate."
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"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading."
"I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."
"A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images."
"She found as always that words on paper proved themselves, they were so beautifully true."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"Books. It's always easier to tell people that a character is funny rather than attempt to hit the punchline of a joke that character would've said. But if we all simply told, books would cease to exist. And so would empathy. And feeling."
"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
"They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."
Explore more quotes by James Schuyler
"To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity."
"It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)."
"I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem."
"In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively."
"It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing."
"However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others."
"The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate."
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