In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
