185 Quotes by Sherwood Anderson

The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn’t matter so much. It’s what you feel about it, what it means to you. A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art – although it may possibly be very good journalism?

It might be that women who have beennurses should not marry physicians. They have too much respect for physicians, are taughtto have too much respect.

It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.

When a job is to be done there’s no use putting it off.

If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,” she explained. “It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

I’ll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don’t count. Maybe I’ll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don’t know. I guess I don’t care much. I just want to work and keep quiet. That’s all I’ve got in mind.