Sunday, November 9, 2008

Dorothy Sayers

"The amount of matter in the universe is limited....But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree-form to create a table-form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction to rearrangement of what went before."

from The Mind of the Maker

1 comment:

Doug P. Baker said...

Dorothy Sayers is brilliant, and this is one of her most interesting books. Had it been old enough even Lord Peter Wimsey would have enjoyed perusing it. She is right; literature does stand apart in this regard.