Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.