Anecdotal Evidence

Isaac Bashevis Singer, speaking with an interviewer in 1983: “I really don’t believe that a writer can have a programme. Many have; they s...

Some fugitive thinkers among us long for order in a manner almost nostalgic:   “I envied those past ages of the world When, as I thought...

Our eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Clymer, had us open the textbook to a poem written seventy-five years earlier and picked students to ...

“When, in the course of a day, a man has read a newspaper, written a letter, and not wronged anyone, that is more than enough.” Enough for w...

“[A] literary man or woman is someone who is not only steeped in literature but has made this immersion into literature part of his or her o...

“He is the supreme poet of childhood. He is at play all his life.”   Had I read this out of context I might have assumed the writer descri...

In the brief foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections (1955), Marianne Moore writes as good an apologia for her manner of writi...