If Wishes Were Stories, Beggars Would Read.

I Think Miss Moore Was Right To Cut "the Steeple-jack" - The Poem Seems Plainer And Clearer In Its Shortened State But She Has Cut Too Much... The Reader May Feel Like Saying, "let Her Do As She Pleases With The Poem; It's Hers, Isn't It?" No; It's Much Too Good A Poem For That, It Long Ago Became Everybody's, And We Can Protest Just As We Could If Donatello Cut Off David's Left Leg.

When You Call People We You Find It Easy To Be Unfair To Them, Since You Yourself Are Included In The Condemnation.

First One Gets Works Of Art, Then Criticism Of Them, Then Criticism Of The Criticism, And, Finally, A Book On The Literary Situation , A Book Which Tells You All About Writers, Critics, Publishing, Paperbacked Books, The Tendencies Of The (literary) Time, What Sells And How Much, What Writers Wear And Drink And Want, What Their Wives Wear And Drink And Want, And So On.

Underneath All His Writing There Is The Settled Determination To Use Certain Words, To Take Certain Attitudes, To Produce A Certain Atmosphere; What He Is Seeing Or Thinking Or Feeling Has Hardly Any Influence On The Way He Writes. The Reader Can Reply, Ironically, "that's What It Means To Have A Style"; But Few People Have So Much Of One, Or One So Obdurate That You Can Say Of It, "it Is A Style That No Subject Can Change.

Reality Is What We Want It To Be Or What We Do Not Want It To Be, But It Is Not Our Wanting Or Our Not Wanting That Makes It So.