The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers.
Interpretation
Writing should be crafted with care, creativity, and attention to detail, much like a well-tended garden.
Samuel Johnson's quote compares the work of a skilled writer to a beautifully cultivated garden, emphasizing that just as a garden requires precision, variety, and nurturing to bloom, so too does writing demand discipline, creativity, and thoughtful construction. The imagery of a garden filled with shades and fragrances suggests that good writing should resonate with beauty and depth, engaging the reader's senses and emotions.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a writing workshop to inspire attendees about the art of writing.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
Art must be in touch with nature - and wherever that touch is gone, Art degenerates - yet it must be above nature.
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
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