Accomplished Quote by Stephen Burt

“Because of his unusual way of handling language, Cummings had to travel a long road from the time his early books were ridiculed for…

— E.E. Cummings

He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.

— John Milton

“He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in…

— Voltaire

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

— Tom Stoppard

I consider William Gay one of the great writers that no one has ever heard of.

— W. Earl Brown

[The publication of his first poem] was wonderful ... but it taught me early on that the only thing that really matters is writing…

— Dan Beachy-Quick

For more than twenty years he [Blanchard] toiled on through the most fatiguing paths of literary composition, mostly in periodicals, often anonymously; pleasing and…

— Samuel Laman Blanchard

“That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell,…

— David Foster Wallace

In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter…

— Stacy Schiff

“With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he…

— Gustave Flaubert

“My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.”

— Harold Bloom

“Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed.…

— John Steinbeck