"Howe's Complaint" (1973), p. 15
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
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Elizabeth Bowen 17
Irish writer 1899–1973Related quotes
Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 12-13.
“I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer.”
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer. It is how it is written that makes a book acceptable, as a work of art, or unacceptable and pornographic. There are many books circulating today, for the teen-ager as well as the grown up, which would not have been printed in the fifties. It is still amazing to me that A Wrinkle In Time was considered too difficult for children. My children were seven, ten, and twelve while I was writing it, and they understood it. The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it.

From Gibbs's letter accepting the Rumford Medal (1881). Quoted in A. L. Mackay, Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (London, 1994).

“The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”

April 18, 1775, p. 258
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II

Section V: “The Parliament of the People”, p. 100 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA100&dq=%22No+student+knows+his+subject%22
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)
The Function of the Little Magazine
The Liberal Imagination (1950)
Context: The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.

ibid.
Cited in: passionriver.com http://www.passionriver.com/blog/previous/32, 12-3-2013

"Dawn Powell: The American Writer" (1987)
1980s, At Home (1988)