Originally Posted by
Basil
*1. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Ernest Hemingway
*2. "He was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Milton
*3. "About eight years or so ago, Valentine's Day, I seem to remember, you received an extremely bad review…and this review, unlike most bad reviews, came accompanied with a very large advance."
*4. "What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event."
*5. "Explaining metaphysics to the nation –
I wish he would explain his Explanation."
6. "Count No 'Count" William Faulkner
7. "Before [him] there had only been good and bad characters, deliverers and traitors, saints and blasphemers, in literature; here the hero is saint and fool in one and the same person." Cervantes
8. "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop [sir], back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." John Keats
*9. "Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks." Joel Chandler Harris
*10. "A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." Percy Shelley
*11. "[He] was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry." Edgar Allan Poe
*12. "[He] did a great many notable things for his country…it is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel." Benjamin Franklin