It Is The Artist's Function Not To

Life - Life - Let There Be Life! Better A Thousand Times The Roaring Hours When Wave And Wind, Like The Arch-murderer In Flight From The Avenger At His Heel, Storm Through The Desolate Fastnesses And Wild Waste Places Of The World!

In The Fell Clutch Of Circumstance, I Have Not Winced Nor Cried Aloud: Under The Bludgeoning Of Chance My Head Is Bloody, But Unbowed.

Essayists, Like Poets, Are Born And Not Made, And For One Worth Remembering, The World Is Confronted With A Hundred Not Worth Reading. Your True Essayist Is, In A Literary Sense, The Friend Of Everybody.

It Is The Artist's Function Not To Copy But To Synthesise: To Eliminate From That Gross Confusion Of Actuality Which Is His Raw Material Whatever Is Accidental, Idle, Irrelevant, And Select For Perpetuation That Only Which Is Appropriate And Immortal.

Shakespeare Often Writes So Ill That You Hesitate To Believe He Could Ever Write Supremely Well; Or, If This Way Of Putting It Seem Indecorous And Abominable, He Very Often Writes So Well That You Are Loth To Believe He Could Ever Have Written Thus Extremely Ill.