Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Interpretation
Writers should focus on depicting characters' journeys towards or away from virtue rather than simply illustrating what virtue is.
This quote highlights the role of writers in exploring the complexities of human nature. Instead of merely presenting idealized notions of virtue, the writer's task is to reveal the struggles and choices that characters make, illustrating the paths individuals can take in their moral journeys.
In practice
During a writing workshop, you might share this quote to inspire budding authors.
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after youβve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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