Quotes from Malcolm Cowley

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you.

Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.

No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.

They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.

but you drank your black coffee by choice, believeng that Paris was sufficient alcohol.

They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.

Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply 'pencil work' as John O'Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.

INTERVIEWER: Do you do much rewriting? Wiper: I forget which of the great sonneteers said: "One line in the fourteen comes from the ceiling; the others have to be adjusted around it." Well, likewise there are passages in every novel whosefirst writing is pretty much the last. But it's the joint and cement, between those spontaneouspassages, that take a great deal of rewriting.

INTERVIEWER: So that you have not eliminated all didactic intentions from your work after all? Thornton Wilder: I suspect that all writers have some didactic intention. That starts the motor. Or let us say: many of the things we eat are cooked over a gas stove, but there is no taste of gas in the food.

Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens.

They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.

Put cotton in your ears and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear Vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: instant old age.

Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.

Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you.

They tell me that you'll lose you mind when you grow older. What they don't say is that you won't miss it very much.

It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child, while not being loved as a child is loved, but merely being kept alive against one's will.