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Admittedly the man who has educated himself is in a better position than the man not educated at all. But his work is sure to bear the mark of his limitation. If one studies the work of the self-educated—and we do not mean here the man who starts out with limited but rigorous and classical educatio…

No ignoramus—no writer who has kept himself innocent of education—has ever produced great art. One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one’s argument, never understands that the argument is an old one (all great arguments are), never …

This is not to say that no one really knows what fiction is or what its limits are; it is simply to recognize that the value or “staying power” of any piece of literature has to do, finally, with the character and personality of the artist who created it—his instincts, his knowledge of art and the …

Art depends heavily on feeling, intuition, taste. It is feeling, not some rule, that tells the abstract painter to put his yellow here and there, not there, and may later tell him that it should have been brown or purple or pea-green. It’s feeling that makes the composer break surprisingly from his…

What the beginning writer ordinarily wants is a set of rules on what to do and what not to do in writing fiction. As we’ll see, some general principles can be set down (Things to Think About When Writing Fiction) and some very general warnings can be offered (Things to Watch Out For); but on the wh…