Author: zdunno03

Philip Larkin answering a question about what the genesis of a poem is

/ zdunno03 / 13 Comments

If I could answer this sort of question, I’d be a professor rather than a librarian. And in any case, I shouldn’t want to. It’s a thing you don’t want to think about. It happens, or happened, and if it’s some thing to be grateful for, you’re grateful.

I remember saying once, I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, They’d do that, too, if their agents could fix it.

James Baldwin on being a prophetic writer

/ zdunno03 / 6 Comments

I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, I don’t look like that. And Picasso replied, You will. And he was right.

James Thurber on the difference between English & American humor

/ zdunno03 / 6 Comments

Well someone once wrote a definition of the difference between English and American humor. I wish I could remember his name. I thought his definition very good. He said that the English treat the commonplace as if it were remarkable and the Americans treat the remarkable as if it were commonplace. I believe that’s true of humorous writing. Years ago we did a parody of Punch in which Benchley did a short piece depicting a wife bursting into a room and shouting, “The primroses are in bloom!”–treating the commonplace as remarkable, you see. In “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” I tried to treat the remarkable as commonplace.