Albert J. Guerard - Quotes

Quotes

Once asked whether he thought it was possible to teach creative writing, Guerard said:

"Yes, so long as the writer-teacher doesn't think of it as a matter of techniques to be passed on, tricks of the trade, formulas for success. The process is empirical. Every genuine writer has a voice of his own -- an inward voice that stems from his temperament as well as from experience. The experienced teacher listens to that voice, helps bring it out."

He was also asked whether it was unusual for a writer to be both novelist and literary critic:

"I suppose it is," he replied. "Yet there is the same psychologizing bent in both kinds of writing ­ the same interest and ambiguity. And both kinds of writing have had a very marked effect on my teaching."

In a 1982 Phi Beta Kappa address, Guerard talked about the role of literature and the humanities in respect to the real world (specifically, in this case, the possibility of nuclear holocaust):

"We have Caspar Weinberger and others suggesting that we can 'prevail' in a protracted war in spite of 50 or 100 million Americans dead. At an intellectual level, this suggests a failure to consult history, and the lesson that governments do not survive catastrophic defeat, which nuclear war would do to both sides. At a visual level, it is a failure to see what 50 or 100 million deaths 'look like.' . . . The greatest writers take us beyond our common sense and selective inattention, even to paradoxical sympathy with the lost and the damned ­ take us, that is, to the recognition of humanity in its most hidden places."