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"I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art."
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"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."
"Most critics, fond of subservient artstill make the whole depend upon a part.They talk of principles, but notions prizeAnd all to one loved folly sacrifice."
"One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin."
"Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become."
"A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture."
"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
Explore more quotes by Anne Stevenson
"I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy."
"Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions."
"I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless."
"I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century."
"I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature."
"There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic."
"I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas."
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