quotes

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic.

The poet gives us a gallery full of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of his time.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

The work of art, the Greeks thought, should possess enargeia, or shining vitality, the enhanced vividness which, when present in a work of art, magnifies it not in size but in impact, the quality that makes your eyes widen as the image seems to fasten on your gaze.

Art can die; what matters is that it should have sown seeds on the earth… It must give birth to a world

Hegel mentions the concept of reconciliation. When a painter paints a portrait, they must reconcile themselves to the subject of the portrait. I felt that if Schutz had proposed to actually make a painting of Emmett Till, proposed a reconciliation with him rather than a photograph of his suffering, that people would have been more open to it.

The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to play with words and to keep playing with them—not to deracinate or deplete them, but to use them as vehicles for discovering history, recovering wounds, reciting damage, and awakening conscience.

Tragedy, called a more exalted kind of consciousness, is so called because it makes us aware of what the character might have been. But to say or strongly imply what a man might have been requires of the author a soundly based, completely believed vision of man's great possibilities. As Aristotle said, the poet is greater than the historian because he presents not only things as they were, but foreshadows what they might have been. We forsake literature when we are content to chronicle disaster.

Poetry should not be regarded as one more means of escape.

We don't always know what intimate life consists of until novels tell us.

Matt Caprioli

Matt Caprioli

quotes