I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things. Guy Davenport Read Quote
I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all the evidence indicates that I was. Guy Davenport Read Quote
As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That’s why writing fiction is so much fun: because you’re moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there’s always something there to keep working on. Guy Davenport Read Quote
The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one’s mind in the workings of another sensibility. Guy Davenport Read Quote
Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker’s attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding. Guy Davenport Read Quote
I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things. Guy Davenport Read Quote
Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it. Guy Davenport Read Quote
The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. Guy Davenport Read Quote
I like to believe that I don’t think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it’s whenever I feel there’s something to be put on paper. I don’t care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night. Guy Davenport Read Quote
Fiction’s essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day. Guy Davenport Read Quote