It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is turning to Crowdfundr to help …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
Here’s another seven-sentence short story! I ran the workshop again at Ganbatte, an anime convention in Saskatoon. It went well, and here’s the one I created, again with the instructions, created by noted SF short-story …
Another When Words Collide, another Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop, as I once again led a group of writers through this plotting exercise devised by noted science fiction short-story writer James Van Pelt. As always, I …
Soulworm, my first published novel (originally released by Royal Fireworks Press in 1997), is now available in a brand-new, lightly revised edition from Shadowpaw Press Reprise. You can purchase it at one of these links …
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A great quote (and a great quote within the great quote)
From About Last Night, the blog of Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal (among other things):
More and more I question the ultimate value of any criticism whose immediate purpose is not to bring its readers into direct contact with beauty (or shorten the amount of time they spend in contact with ugliness). The purpose of my professional life is to make people happier, and I try not to let myself forget that my way of bringing it about can never be anything more than an imperfect means to a blessed end. C.S. Lewis said it better than I can: “If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.”
Sounds like a darn good philosophy for a critic.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2005/08/a-great-quote-and-a-great-quote-within-the-great-quote/