Voltaire Quotes

Genius now and then produces a lucky trifle. We still read the Dove of Anacreon, and Sparrow of Catullus; and a writer naturally pleases himself with a performance which owes nothing to the subject.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I'm sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can't be literary.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

George Saunders is a complete genius.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Poesy must not be drawn by the ears: it must be gently led, or rather, it must lead, which was partly the cause that made the ancient learned affirm it was a divine, and no human skill, since all other knowledges lie ready for any that have strength of wit; a poet no industry can make, if his own genius be not carried into it.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

I was born Chinese, and I write in Chinese. I don't think there's any need to evade this... to a writer, as to a person, what matters is not his political label or his nationality, but whether he is a person and whether his work is worth looking at.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

If we want good stories, writers should be given their due.

Kendrick Lamar is a great, great thinker. He's a tremendous artist.

Dryden 's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.

The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.

Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.

I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.

There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

Poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.