Aristotle Quotes

You have not done well to publish your books of Rhetoric; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open to all?

David Milch, twice I got lectures from him about the theory of writing. I told my wife one night when I got home, 'I feel like I'm being paid to sit at the feet of Aristotle.'

The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called 'Poetics.' It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.

Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

He [Aristotle] pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.' Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you've painted yourself in a plot corner.

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.

Also, as an author, character has always been what I'm most interested in - much more so than plot or setting, although those are good things too.

Language is the machine of the poet.

RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

I have never considered myself a poet. Therefore, I am not a rival of anyone, and I do not consider anybody my rival.