“Lackadaisical Elements,” p. 93
The Creator (2000), Sequence: “Nostalgic Elements”
Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)
“I had a story tell, a story that needed to be told so that people would know the truth.”
Congressional testimony (2007)
Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose
Source: Let the Great World Spin
Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 13 : Suggesting Themes of Universal Appeal
"Fiction", speech to the Royal Society of Literature, June 1926; published in Writings on Writing: Rudyard Kipling (1996), ed. Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis, p. 80 http://books.google.com/books?id=-AQStA5QMjwC&q=%22elder+sister%22&pg=PA80
Other works
Bryn Mawr Commencement Address https://books.google.com/books?id=QK6TYg32CocC&pg=PA160 (1986), in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1997), p. 160
"The State of the Theatre" an interview by Henry Brandon in Harpers 221 (November 1960)
Context: I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge.
