They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
Give the villagers village arithmetic, village geography, village history and the literary knowledge that they must use daily, i.e. reading and writing letters, etc.
Each genre has its own process. I'm very intuitive about poetry. I usually write first and second drafts out by hand. The other end of the spectrum is journalism, which is much more cerebral, more thought-out and planned. Fiction lies somewhere in between. I usually start intuitively but eventually I need to stop and consider structure, or research, or both.
There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.
When you live from freelance check to freelance check, your mind is always on "What's the next piece I'm going to write, or draw, that'll pay this month's rent?" And so going out to play ball with my kids was a low priority.
The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
There is no learned man but will confess be hath much profited by reading controversies,--his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together, more evidently appear; it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth.
Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?
One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem. By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself. I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that. So to try to truly render the kind of economic and racial inequity I grew up in, I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn't fun to write, even though the poems aren't 100% autobiographical.