Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher. Read full biography of Guy Davenport →
The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip... →
Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.
I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all the evidence indicates that I was.
I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.
I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.
There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.
I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good... →
My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think... →
Art knows neither doctrine nor idea; its nature is to show.
The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.
As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making... →
Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My... →
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now... →
Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.