Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur, last stanza
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)
“I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand."”
The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Timber: or Discoveries
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Ben Jonson 93
English writer 1572–1637Related quotes
Source: An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Ch. 4: The Sense of Form (pp. 24-25)
Prologue to Thomson's Coriolanus; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Kaka on Steven Gerrard http://uk.reuters.com/article/2007/05/15/uk-soccer-champions-kaka-idUKL1540342020070515, (May 2006)
“I would have been happier had he also found a series of intelligent answers”
Conservative Political Centre Lecture (11 October 1968) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101632
Backbench MP
Context: One of the effects of the rapid spread of higher education has been to equip people to criticise and question almost everything. Some of them seem to have stopped there instead of going on to the next stage which is to arrive at new beliefs or to reaffirm old ones. You will perhaps remember seeing in the press the report that the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit has been awarded a degree on the result of his past work. His examiners said that he had posed a series of most intelligent questions. Significant? I would have been happier had he also found a series of intelligent answers.
“I’m a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.”
Draft of a preface in “Notebook 16”; Quoted in The Collected Works of J.M. Synge, vol. 1, Introduction.
Letter to his brother Jeff, from Hawaii (7 April 1941); p. 11
To Reach Eternity (1989)