“Abraham Lincoln is my name
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast and speed
and left it here for fools to read”
Manuscript poem, as a teenager (ca. 1824–1826), in "Lincoln as Poet" at Library of Congress : Presidents as Poets http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/al.html, as published in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) edited by Roy. P. Basler, Vol. 1
1820s
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Abraham Lincoln 618
16th President of the United States 1809–1865Related quotes

“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.”

Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause.<p>Uniting to fight the foes we face, anger, resentment and hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness. With unity, we can do great things, important things.
2021, January, Presidential Inaugural Address (2021)

Introduction, st. 5
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From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (October 9, 1925)
Letters

“Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen
he will be good but
god knows When”
Manuscript poem, as a teenager (ca. 1824–1826) http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/al.html#1, in "Lincoln as Poet" at Library of Congress : Presidents as Poets http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/al.html also in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) edited by Roy. P. Basler, Vol. 1
1820s

“Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro.”
Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.
Paris Review Interview (1990)