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ABOUT WRITING |
ABOUT WRITING |
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The Creative Mood
- Henry James
Imagination All Compact
The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. - William Shakespeare
The Novelist and the Poet
Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, even although he may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is absolutely indispensible to him; his accurate power of examining and embodying human character and human passion, as well as the external face of nature, is not less essential; and the talent describing well what he feels with acuteness, added to the above requisites, goes far to complete the poetic character. - Sir Walter Scott
Intuition
Intuition alone, however tenuous its consistency, however improbable its shape, is a criterion of truth and, for that reason, deserves to be accepted by the mind because it alone is capable, if the mind can extract that truth, of bringing it to greater perfection and of giving it pleasure without alloy. Intuition for the writer is what experiment is for the learned, with the difference that in the case of the learned the work of the intelligence precedes and in the case of the writer it follows. - Unknown
That which we have not been forced to decipher, to clarify by our own personal
effort, that which was made clear before, is not ours. Only that issues
from ourselves which we ourselves extract from the darkness within ourselves
and which is unknown to others. And as art exactly recomposes life, an
atmosphere of poetry surrounds those truths within ourselves to which we
attain, the sweetness of a mystery which is but the twilight through which
we have passed.
- Marcel Proust
What Metre Is
The difference between the rhythms of prose and verse is this, that poetry selects certain rhythms and makes systems of them, and these repeat themselves; and this is metre. - Robert Bridges
On Style
Altogether, the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; therefore, if any man wish to write a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul. - J. W. von Goethe
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