“No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: "Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?" for the implication always is that one does not write any longer so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.”

— Ford Madox Ford

Dedicatory letter to Stella Ford http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/fmf/gsdl.htm (1927-01-09) in The Good Soldier, second edition.

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English writer and publisher 1873–1939

Alan Axelrod (1952) American historian

Alan Axelrod in an interview with Frank R. Shaw, Aug 23, 2007 http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/axelrod.htm.

“Well, I think that when I’m writing about Haiti, I’m just writing one long, ongoing story. But I really did feel, like a lot of people did, that after the earthquake, there were suddenly two Haitis: the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So I feel that I’ve been writing about the first one much longer. And writing about the earthquake… it’s been such a short period of time and it’s still such a raw experience that the few things that I’ve written about it, I feel like I’ve written them to process it myself.”

Edwidge Danticat (1969) Novelist, short story writer, memoirist

On how she views Haiti since a major earthquake in in “An Interview | Edwidge Danticat” http://www.bkreview.org/fall-2018/an-interview-with-edwidge-danticat/ in The Brooklyn Review (Fall 2018)
Interviews

“Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change."”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955) [p. 237]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist. ”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

“Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

“The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people who can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

[Morgan, Forrest, Shakespeare—the Man, published in the Prospective Review, July 1853, The works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, 1891, Hartford, Connecticut, Travelers Insurance Company, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101064786716;view=1up;seq=373, 265–266 of 255–302]
Shakespeare—the Man (1853)

“[T]he very people who write so disparagingly about it either do not understand it, or I suspect even more, understand it all too well and do not like the implications of it.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

"Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation" https://www.c-span.org/video/?186036-1/lincolns-emancipation-proclamation (23 March 2005), C-SPAN
2000s

“As well as the greatest optimist I see the lark soaring in the spring air, but I also see a young girl of about twenty, who might have been in good health, a victim to consumption, and who will perhaps drown herself before she dies of an illness. If one is always in respectable company among rather well-to-do bourgeois one does not notice this so much perhaps, but if one has dined for years on 'la vache enragee', as I did, one cannot deny that great misery is a fact that weighs down the scale.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Antwerp Belgium, Winter 1886; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 453), p. 38
1880s, 1886

“Every author has several motivations for writing, and authors of technical books always have, as one motivation, the personal need to understand; that is, they write because they want to learn, or to understand a phenomenon, or to think through a set of ideas.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Theory of Systems Engineering (1967), p. v;

“When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more… exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.”

Marguerite Duras book The Lover

Source: The Lover

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