Hopkins Quotes - page 2
Mark Hopkins was one of the truest and best men that ever lived. He had a keen analytical mind; was thoroughly accurate, and took general supervision of the books, contracts, etc. He was strictly the office man, and never bought or sold anything. I always felt when I was in the East that our business in his hands was entirely safe.
Collis Potter Huntington
I had never met a poet in my life before winning the Pulitzer in 1945. Well, that's not strictly true; when I went to Johns Hopkins in 1939, W. H. Auden gave a private reading to a group of special literature students, and I was one. I shook hands with him. As it happened, at that time he was my idol, above all others as a modern poet, and that experience was a very sustaining one. But I could hardly say I "knew” him.
Karl Shapiro
How come you write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Donald replied, "Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.”
Asked another, likewise disingenuosly, "How can we become better writers than we are?”
"For starters," DB advised, "read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.”
"But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester....”
"That, too,” Donald affirmed, and turned on that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-Eleventh-Street twinkle of his. "You're probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.
Donald Barthelme
