A Quote by Giacomo Casanova

When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.

Giacomo Casanova

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Bad Mediocre Should Sonnet Sublime

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Giacomo Casanova
Italian - Celebrity
April 2, 1725 - June 4, 1798

My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again.

James Fenton

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

James Fenton

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit

Madeleine L'Engle

In December 1989, my mother died very suddenly, and that sparked a re-evaluation of what I was doing, and I realized I was mediocre at everything. I was a mediocre IBM employee, I was a mediocre entrepreneur, I was a mediocre artist. I decided that, although my mom wouldn't be around to see it, I wanted to be great at something.

Jim McKelvey

There's too much bad. The worst is mediocre. Bad is easy. There's high quality, there's pornography, and then there's bad.

Henry Blodget

There's mediocre jazz, mediocre salesmen, mediocre golfers. If you want to be good, you have to really hone your skills.

Jason Moran

In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm or meter…And each line has to end with a rigid pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet…But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants…You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

Madeleine L'Engle

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

Sherman Alexie

You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

Madeleine L'Engle

What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.

Zadie Smith

Why should I hold back now and sound mediocre, just so I can sound mediocre twenty years from now?

Janis Joplin

By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!

Alfred Enoch

I keep thinking of Robert Stone making the distinction between the word sublime and the word beautiful. He described being in a battle as sublime. Because even though people were dying, it was such a huge sensory experience that it became sublime.

George Saunders

I make a lot of pots in a year's time and some of them are good and some of them are mediocre and some of them are bad. If they're really bad and I'd be ashamed of them, I throw them out, but if they're mediocre and they'll serve the purpose for which they're designed, that is, a mixing bowl or a soup bowl or a plate or whatever, I sell them. And this income from the sale of these pots permits me to go on and make other pots. It's even more important now that I've quit teaching, because I do not have a teacher's salary to fall back on.

Warren MacKenzie

For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!... A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not - but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes - bad, if he always stays in the same place.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

A Quote by Giacomo Casanova

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