The Black Prince Literature and Writing Quotes

I am a writer. 'A writer' is indeed the simplest also the most accurate general description of me. In so far as I am also a psychologist, an amateur philosopher, a student of human affairs, I am so because these things are a part of being the kind of writer that I am. I have always been a seeker. And my seeking has taken the form of that attempt to tell truth of which I have just spoken. (Bradley Pearson's Foreword: par. 2)

I have, I hope and I believe, kept my gift pure. This means, among other things, that I have never been a successful writer. I have never tried to please at the expense of truth. I have known, for long periods, the torture of a life without self-expression. The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait. Art has its martyrs, not least those who have preserved their silence. (Bradley Pearson's Foreword: par. 2)

I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already 'done' them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. (Bradley Pearson's Foreword: par. 4)

In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal. For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness. (Bradley Pearson's Foreword: par. 14)

Oh come, be humbler, let cheerfulness break in! I can't think why you worry so. Thinking of yourself as a 'writer' is part of your trouble. Why not just think of yourself as someone who very occasionally writes something, who may in the future write something? Why make a life drama out of it? (1.3.231)

I felt a sizzling warmth in my coat pocket wherein I had thrust the folded manuscript of my review of Arnold's novel. Arnold Baffin's work was a congeries of amusing anecdotes loosely garbled into 'racy stories' with the help of half-baked unmeditated symbolism. The dark powers of imagination were conspicuous by their absence. Arnold Baffin wrote too much, too fast. Arnold Baffin was really just a talented journalist. (1.3.238)

Yes, it was time to move. I had felt, during recent months, sometimes boredom, sometimes despair, as I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle, now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art. The trouble was that the dark blaze, whose absence I had deplored in Arnold's work, was absent here as well. I could not fire and fuse these thoughts, these people, into a whole thing. (1.5.4)

Daddy writes too much, don't you think? He hardly ever revises. He writes something, then he "gets rid of it" by publishing it, I've heard him actually say that, and then he writes something else. He's always in such a hurry, it's neurotic. I see no point in being an artist unless you try all the time to be perfect. (1.4.49)

'Now if the greatest of all geniuses permits himself to be the hero of one of his plays, has this happened by accident?' 

'No.'

'Is he unconscious of it?'

'No.'

'Correct. So this must be what the play is about.'

'Oh. What?'

'About Shakespeare's own identity. About his urge to externalize himself as the most romantic of all romantic heroes.' (1.23.141-47)

He has performed a supreme creative feat, a work endlessly reflecting upon itself, not discursively but in its very substance, a Chinese box of words as high as the tower of Babel, a meditation upon the bottomless trickery of consciousness and the redemptive role of words in the lives of those without identity, that is human beings. (1.23.171)