T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Quotes

• Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.

• Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

• The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

• When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.

• An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

• Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

• As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

• Business today consists in persuading crowds.

• Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

• For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

• If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

• If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

• It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

• Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

• Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

• Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least, not until the producers or the public tell you to.

• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

• Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

• Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.