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"My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative."
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"Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?"

"Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness."

"Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate."

"An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear."

"I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange."
Explore more quotes by Laurence Housman

"I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result."

"That was luck: I should not then have been a conscientious objector; but I am quite sure that the abominations of war would have made me one, as soon as I got to the front."

"I still think that if the human race, or even one nation, could only get right about its God the rest would follow."

"The man who bears my name, and who claims to be me, was born on July 15, 1865, the sixth in a family of seven. He was an ugly child, and remained ugly till his eighteenth year, when his looks gradually improved."

"If I loved all the world as I do you, I shouldn't write books to it: I should only write letters to it, and that would be only a clumsy stage on the way to entire telepathy."

"Two more years were to go by before I knew anything about William Blake. Many years later, when his wife died, my godfather gave me the two books as a remembrance."

"It is right and natural that generous minds while in the twenties should think the books which try to reform the world's wrong the greatest of all."

"My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together."

"For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own."
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