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Very few professional reporters become playwrights. I am a watcher, an observer, a reflector, not an
instigator. Art is -- to quote from Thomas de Quincey, who was probably quoting from someone else -- art is idem in alio: the same thing in another form. It's a transposition, it's the author taking a little from
this man he knows, and a little from that man he knows, and various bits from various people, and
rolling them all together and turning them into a different character. But I am different from the
author: I'm interested in you as you, not you as a future component of somebody else, not you translated
or transposed, not you as a symbol. That's what makes me a journalist instead of a novelist or playwright.
-- Kenneth Tynan
Djuna Barnes's prose is the only prose by a living writer which can be compared with that of Joyce, and
in one point it is superior to his: in its richness in exact and vivid imagery entirely without that prettiness which so readily creeps into an Irish style. There is not in her use of language, as there is in Joyce's, the faint suggestion of a possible distinction between the thing said an the way in which it is said, the feeling that one could have said it another way if one had liked. A style which is inevitable and inventive at the same time is the most powerful of all styles; for it both removes our opposition to it and takes us with its novelty.
-- Edwin Muir
I’m writing with a great freedom, and the only way I can do that is by not thinking about my family reading it.
-- Han Ong
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