Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.