T. S. Eliot Writing Quotations

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

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.