Sylvan Barnet > Quotes

“Man is mortal. This is his fate. Man pretends not to be mortal. That is his sin. Man is a creature of time and place, whose perspectives and insights are invariably conditioned by his immediate circumstances.”
― Sylvan Barnet

“We can say that Faustus makes a choice, and that he is responsible for his choice, but there is in the play a suggestion—sometimes explicit, sometimes only dimly implicit—that Faustus comes to destruction not merely through his own actions but through the actions of a hostile cosmos that entraps him. In this sense, too, there is something of Everyman in Faustus. The story of Adam, for instance, insists on Adam's culpability; Adam, like Faustus, made himself, rather than God, the center of his existence. And yet, despite the traditional expositions, one cannot entirely suppress the commonsense response that if the Creator knew Adam would fall, the Creator rather than Adam is responsible for the fall; Adam ought to have been created of better stuff.”
― Sylvan Barnet, Dr. Faustus

“Outlining, in short, is not merely a way of organizing ideas but is also a way of getting ideas.”
― Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art

“Because most artists have not told us of their intentions, and beacause those artists ( and patrons or agents) who have stated their intentions may not be fully reliable sources, and because we inevitably see things from our own points of view, think twice before you attribute intention to the artist [...].”
― Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art

“Something is wrong with a sentence when you can delete words and not sense the loss.”
― Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art