"Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Poets from the United StatesDemocratic socialistsBeat Generation writersUniversity of Pennsylvania alumniPhysicians from New Jersey
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Margaret Atwood, "An End to Audience?" (1980), collected in Second Words: selected critical prose
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (17 September 1883 – 4 March 1963) was an American poet and physician.
66 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by William Carlos Williams →
Related Quotes
"I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they c…"
"The storm unfolds."
"the set pieces of your faces stir me — leading citizens — but not in the same way."
"I lie here thinking of you:—the stain of love is upon the world!"
"One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others hap…"
"To tell the truth, I myself never quite feel that I know what I am talking about — if I did, and when I do, the thing…"
"It is in tune with the tempo of life — scattered yet welded into the whole, — broken, yet woven together."
"The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic."
"Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation…"
"Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrins…"