The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
Mark TwainRead
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Interpretation
Mark Twain emphasizes the unique skill required to write effectively about weather, suggesting it's an art that demands training.
In this quote, Mark Twain recognizes that writing about weather is not just a simple task but rather a literary craft that requires skill and experience. He implies that only those who have honed their ability to observe and articulate the complexities of weather can produce quality writing on the subject, suggesting that literary appreciation stems from both knowledge and practice.
In practice
A writer might use this quote to encourage aspiring authors in a workshop about the intricacies of crafting descriptive scenes.
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Some things you can't find out; but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing: no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.
That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.
After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.
It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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