“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (…) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way.”

Memories and Portraits, ch. IV. A College Magazine (1887).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, t…" by Robert Louis Stevenson?
Robert Louis Stevenson photo
Robert Louis Stevenson 118
Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer 1850–1894

Related quotes

Michael Moorcock photo

“I must admit, sir, that I have modified the verses a little, to allow for the new things I have learned, so I am an unreliable source of truth, sir, save in its most fundamental sense. Like a majority of poets, sir.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 3 “A Rose Redeemed; A Rose Revived,” Chapter 1 “Of Weapons Possessed of Will” (p. 270)
The Elric Cycle, The Revenge of the Rose (1991)

John Green photo

“I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have. It's the only way of learning how to write a story.”

John Green (1977) American author and vlogger

Nov. 26th: Writing Advice (And Notes on Surnameless Tiffany) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gf69J1Go98&feature=channel
YouTube

Tom Stoppard photo

“I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

"Tom Stoppard," profile by Kenneth Tynan, The New Yorker (1977-12-19).
Interviews and profiles

María Irene Fornés photo
Girish Raghunath Karnad photo
Jorge Luis Borges photo

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Source: Collected Fictions

Pat Conroy photo

“Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: My Reading Life

Ernest Hemingway photo

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

On the loss of a suitcase containing work from his first two years as a writer, as quoted in With Hemingway (1984) by Arnold Samuelson

William Saroyan photo

“I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

"One Day in the Afternoon of the World" (1964)
Context: I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

Related topics