Share this page: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. [sic] -- On the Art of Writing: Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913–1914 The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite. To be sure, a man must come to such a task as mine haunted by his youth and the favourites he loved in days when he had much enthusiasm but little reading. -- Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), Preface Share this page:

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