The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
I never willfully want to write the same record twice, which is probably why I jump from project to project. But I can't ignore that there are things that inspire me, and I love celebrating those.
I'm very interested in compassion - compassion for oneself and others. I write about very complicated characters and experiences and try to do it without judging the character or the action.
At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.
I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.
The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable inall ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.
The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible