Burton Rascoe Quotations

What no wife of a writer understands is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing.

I felt exactly like the man in the advertisement who has not devoted fifteen minutes a day to the study of the classics. If only (I thought) I had devoted fifteen minutes a day to the cultivation of the aesthetic attitude! I could bound Afghanistan.

American literature has been, and is, singularly deficient in established critics who have anything like a rational conception of their jobs. The majority, initiate in a few of the patent rituals of Aristotle and Quintilian , don the forbidding robes of high priests to Sweetness and Light, and go about their business much as if the idea were to keep all they know to themselves.

A news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has color and life - what people are interested in. That's journalism.

Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.