“Dichotomy,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Interviewer:  Do you have any unfinished poems that you look at occasionally?

T.S. Eliot:  I haven’t much in that way, no.  As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out.  It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer.  If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

Writers at Work:  The Paris Review Interviews 2nd Series, edited by George Plimpton and introduced by Van Wyck Brooks       

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