I tell you, writing is a business.
Get together half-a-dozen fair specimens of the Sunday-school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day.
There's no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life.

We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.

If I could only get that into poor Reardon's head.

He thinks me a gross beast, often enough.

What the devil--I mean what on earth is there in typography to make everything it deals with sacred?
I don't advocate the propagation of vicious literature; I speak only of good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar.