If I loved all the world as I do you, I shouldn't write books to it: I should only write letters to it, and that would be only a clumsy stage on the way to entire telepathy.
From Laurence Housman
It is right and natural that generous minds while in the twenties should think the books which try to reform the world's wrong the greatest of all.
It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion - death brought them into harmony.
It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.
Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.
My best chance is that, in a happy moment, I hit upon St Francis as the subject for a series of plays. Others might have written them better: but, as I have written them, the advantage will probably remain mine.
My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together.
My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives