The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not,… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short,… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom,… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
