In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I could list hundreds of words I've come up against in the course of my work that did not exist in the era of which I was writing and for which I never could find a suitably old-time, archaic or obsolete substitute.
Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.
I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word.
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.