Home > Author > Malcolm Cowley
1 " No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence. "
― Malcolm Cowley
2 " They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more. "
― Malcolm Cowley , Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
3 " Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book. "
4 " There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply ‘pencil work’ as John O’Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work. "
5 " The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere. "
6 " They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much. "
7 " ...but you drank your black coffee by choice, believeng that Paris was sufficient alcohol. "
8 " Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed. "
9 " Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be. "
10 " The germ of a story is something seen or heard, or heard about, or suddenly remembered; it may be a remark casually dropped at the dinner table (as in the case of Henry James's story, The Spoils of Poynton ) , or again it may be the look on a stranger's face. Almost always it is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood; something that expresses the mood in one sharp detail; something that serves as a focal point for a hitherto disorganized mass of remembered material in the author's mind. James describes it as "the precious particle ... the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at a touch of which the novelist's imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point," and he adds that "its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible. "
― Malcolm Cowley , Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series
11 " Thornton Wilder: The problem of telling you about my past life as a writer is like that of imaginative narration itself; it lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom. A great deal of writing and talking about the past is unacceptable. It freezes the historical in a determinism. Today’swriter smugly passes his last judgment and confers on existing attitudes the lifeless aspect of plaster-cast statues in a museum.He recounts the past as though the characters knew what was going to happen next. "
12 " INTERVIEWER: So that you have not eliminated all didactic intentions from your work after all?Thornton Wilder: I suspect that all writers have some didactic intention.That starts the motor. Or let us say: many of the things we eat are cooked over a gas stove, but there is no taste of gas in the food. "
