Literary Birthday – 23 November – Guy Davenport
Guy Davenport was born on 23 November 1927 and died on 4 January 2005.
Guy Davenport Quotes
- I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.
- 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.
- Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.
- 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.
- I suppose you wait until it’s irresistible, then start working on it one way or another. When that time comes, I move from longhand to the typewriter.
- The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.
- Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralysing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
- Isn’t all art symbolic? Art itself is symbol. A symbol is simply a drenched identity, a thing more than equal to itself
Guy Davenport was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher. He attended Duke, Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, and Harvard (PhD). He taught at Harvard, Haverford, and the University of Kentucky. He is best known for his modernist-style short stories, but his range of works is wide. Davenport published more than 45 books, and his works include Da Vinci’s Bicycle
Image Fair Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Guy_davenport_-_a_balthus_notebook.jpg
by Amanda Patterson
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