[The prolific generosity of Dylan's talent down the years has been a wonder to behold.] Industry... is itself the artist's portion, ... There is no question that quantity - added, of course, to genius - is what separates major writers from minor ones. |
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. |
Heir to the Glimmering World |
I find that writing comes from the three fingers. The thumb, the index and middle fingers. It flows out of the pen. Real writing comes out of your hand, for me, anyway, |
I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer. There's nothing he's afraid to say. |
I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career," but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer. |
I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called ''scientific'' mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips. |
If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest, ... then Bellow's charge has been to restore the soul to American literature. |
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning, yelling works better |
Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey |
The engineering is secondary to the vision. |
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap. |
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination |
Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye. |
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. |