The William Saroyan Reader (1958)
Context: The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.
“Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.”
Letter to writer André Gide, as quoted in The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1978) by Julian Symons, Pt. 1, Epilogue
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Paul Valéry 89
French poet, essayist, and philosopher 1871–1945Related quotes
"Algren at the height of his success" in 1950, quoted by Richard Flanagan, 2005.
Nonfiction works
“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”
Source: Flaubert's Parrot
[Bob Kane and Tom Andrae, Batman & Me, Eclipse Books, Forestville, CA, 1989, 1-56060-017-9, 44]
“A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
6 April 1856 (p. 312)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)
Nonconformity (1953/1996)
Context: The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources. The shortcut to comfort is called “specialization,” and in an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor this makes sense. But in a writer it is fatal. The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.
Radio interview (1939) quoted in Introduction by Robert DeMott to a 1992 edition of The Grapes of Wrath
Context: Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor … And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now.