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I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.

Sherwood Anderson

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Sherwood Anderson
Age: 64 †
Born: 1876
Born: September 13
Died: 1941
Died: March 8
Novelist
Writer
Buck Fever
Writing
Painter
Men
Constantly
Writers
Manufacturers
Painting
Merchants
Knowledge
Drift
Business
Painters
Littles
Manufacturing
Little
Amazed

More quotes by Sherwood Anderson

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My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a sign-writer.
Sherwood Anderson
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I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.
Sherwood Anderson
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Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.
Sherwood Anderson
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The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Sherwood Anderson
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All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child--something of that sort--gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.
Sherwood Anderson
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There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.
Sherwood Anderson
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It may be true of all relationships, not only between fathers and sons, but between men and women. Nothing seems fixed. Everything is always changing. We seem to have very little control over our emotional life.
Sherwood Anderson
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Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. 'The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two.
Sherwood Anderson
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I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.
Sherwood Anderson
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Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.
Sherwood Anderson
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The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
Sherwood Anderson
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It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.
Sherwood Anderson
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Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.
Sherwood Anderson
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If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
Sherwood Anderson
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Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.
Sherwood Anderson
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The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities.
Sherwood Anderson
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The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.
Sherwood Anderson
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What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.
Sherwood Anderson
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Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.
Sherwood Anderson