V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic
Quoted in " How Did I Do That? http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/pritchett-complete.html" by Deborah Stead, in The New York Times (24 March 1991)
Source: The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 9
V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic
Quoted in " How Did I Do That? http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/pritchett-complete.html" by Deborah Stead, in The New York Times (24 March 1991)
“You are either born a writer or you are not.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States
which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next — one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.
Autobiographical Notes (1952)
William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist
Source: The Autobiography of William Cobbett (1933), Ch. 8, p. 99.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
"A Sketch of the Past" (written 1939, published posthumously)
“Make way, you Roman writers, make way, Greeks!
Something greater than the Iliad is born.”
Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai!
Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.
Propertius (-47–-16 BC) Latin elegiac poet
Of Virgil’s Aeneid.
II, xxxiv, 65.
Elegies