Sherwood Anderson Quotes

Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.

You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.

There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.

I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.

The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.

Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?.

Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern - the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.

If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.

It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.

I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.

Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings. Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.

You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

What's wrong with this egotism? If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?

If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.

Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.

Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands. Then you can think of the thing before you.

Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.

The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood.

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood.

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.

Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.

The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities.

I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.

Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.

There is a kind of shrewdness many men have that enables them to get money. It is the shrewdness of the fox after the chicken. A low order of mentality often goes with it.

When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.

Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.

Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.

Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

When a job is to be done there's no use putting it off.

It is all right you're saying you do not need other people, but there are a lot of people who need you.

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

...she thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed something in them.

People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

A man needs a purpose for real health.

I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.

The writer, an old man with a white moustache, had some difficulty getting into bed.

The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self.

Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.

What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.