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If you don’t set your writing — and teaching — at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

— M. H. Abrams People's Education interview (2007)

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Writing

More quotes by M. H. Abrams

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable.

People's Education interview (2007)

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”

Suman Pokhrel

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Robert Benchley

Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.

William Wordsworth Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: M. H. Abrams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.