Writers on Writers
by dollydelightly
“Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon.”
Truman Capote
“I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”
Charles Darwin
“I think I have a more poetical mind than Butler’s.”
E.M Forster
“As great a poet as Dante might have been, I wouldn’t have had the slightest wish to have known him personally.”
W.H Auden
“After Proust there are certain things that simply cannot be done again.”
Francoise Sagan
“Dumas: that extraordinary old gentleman, who sat down and thought nothing of writing six volumes of The Count of Monte Cristo in a few months.”
Aldous Huxley
“De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”
Aldous Huxley
“I think that Hemingway made real discoveries about the use of language in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. I admired the way he made drunk people talk.”
Evelyn Waugh
“Old age realises the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.”
Søren Kierkegaard
“It’s unthinkable not to love – you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip Larkin.”
Lawrence Durrell
Sources: The Paris Review, Goodreads
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Auden might have been feeling plagued by fans, Larkin had a lover, and always wrote to her, probably Darwin should have tried going to the theatre rather than reading, because the actors give life to the words; and Waugh is being bitchy in a wonderfully subtle, English upper middle class way. Thank you.
Hi Dolly, thought you might like this performance by Edgar Oliver performing at the 2011 PEN International Festival (if you haven’t seen it already):
(Sorry this comment’s off topic…)
Oops, sorry, didn’t mean the link to turn into a stonking great embedded vid! I’m glad EM Forster’s name made it onto your blog, by the way. A very boring man by the standards of most of the authors you’ve reviewed but I do agree with him that he had poetical (and decent) mind.