Art Is Long, And Critics Are The

Most Works Of Art Are, Necessarily, Bad...; One Suffers Through The Many For The Few.

If You Never Look Just Wrong To Your Contemporaries You Will Never Look Just Right To Posterity - Every Writer Has To Try To Be, To Some Extent, Sometimes, A Law Unto Himself.

If Poetry Were Nothing But Texture, [dylan] Thomas Would Be As Good As Any Poet Alive. The What Of His Poems Is Hardly Essential To Their Success, And The Best And Most Brilliantly Written Pieces Usually Say Less Than The Worst.

The Usual Criticism Of A Novel About An Artist Is That, No Matter How Real He Is As A Man, He Is Not Real To Us As An Artist, Since We Have To Take On Trust The Works Of Art He Produces.

Underneath All His Writing There Is The Settled Determination To Use Certain Words, To Take Certain Attitudes, To Produce A Certain Atmosphere; What He Is Seeing Or Thinking Or Feeling Has Hardly Any Influence On The Way He Writes. The Reader Can Reply, Ironically, "that's What It Means To Have A Style"; But Few People Have So Much Of One, Or One So Obdurate That You Can Say Of It, "it Is A Style That No Subject Can Change.