Top 31 Quotes & Sayings by Guy Davenport

I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it's whenever I feel there's something to be put on paper. I don't care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night.

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.

There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.

The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.

My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.

I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all the evidence indicates that I was.

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker's attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.

Art knows neither doctrine nor idea; its nature is to show.

The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace of things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the procession of the equinoxes, the dances of Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift runners at Olympia.

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

Theres nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.

In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.

We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.

I’ve carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it’s on stage, the show belongs to the puppet.

nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

Originality houses many rooms, and the views from the windows are all different.

A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.Poetry is the voice of a poet at its birth, and the voice of a people in its ultimate fulfillment as a successful and useful work of art.

There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are of the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of an athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy.