Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Andersonwas an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 September 1876
CityCamden, OH
CountryUnited States of America
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.
My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a "sign-writer.
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.
People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.
The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.
I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.
Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.
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.
It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.
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.
The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
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.
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.