What is with waiters who don't write anything down and memorize your order instead? Are you trying to impress me or something? If you were that smart you wouldn't be a goddamn waiter in the first place.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying.
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.
Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!
Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible
Sometimes, even when I'm writing the lyrics, I'm not sure what I'm getting at, but then months will pass and I'll listen to it and I'll understand it completely. I think I trust myself in that most of what comes out of me will be honest. Even if it seems like it doesn't make a lot of sense, I realize that it does. It's hard to follow, and maybe there's a lot of subtext to it that nobody knows, so it makes it impossible to follow.
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.