“Perhaps it would be best to abandon the idea that any one text represents the ‘definitive’ version of a Shakespeare play. After all, the quest for a ‘definitive’ text, based on a ‘single lost original’, was premissed on the principles of Classical and biblical textual criticism. It is not necessarily appropriate for more modern literary and, especially, dramatic texts. ‘Version-based editing’ now seems a more fitting way of approaching authors (such as Wordsworth in The Prelude, or Henry James in the New York Edition of his novels) who self-consciously revised their word. Theatre is a supremely mobile art form, and we need a similar version-based approach to Shakespeare. We cannot be confident about the degree of authorial control in the revision of Shakespeare’s plays, or the extent to which it was systematic or haphazard; but we can be confident that many of the thousands of differences between the quarto and Folio texts are best explained by accepting that the texts embody different moments in those plays’ theatrical lives.”

(Jonathan Bate, “The Folio Restored,” p. 12 of the 20 April 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement.)

“There is a great virtue in such an isolation. It permits a fair interval for thought. That is, what I call thinking, which is mainly scribbling. It has always been during the act of scribbling that I have gotten most of my satisfactions.”

(William Carlos Wiliiams, forward to The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, unpaginated.)

“Knowing that work will never be finished is bad. Worse, nevertheless, is never-done work. The work that we do, at least, is left done. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the only pot my crippled neighbor has. The plant is her joy – sometimes it’s mine as well. What I write, and recognize to be bad, can also supply a few moments of distraction from worse things to one or another sorrowful or sad spirit. It’s enough for me, or it’s not enough, but in some way it’s useful, and that’s the way my whole life is.

A tedium that includes the anticipation of just more tedium; the grief, already, of grieving tomorrow for having grieved today – great, useless entanglements possessing no truth, great entanglements . . .

. . . where, huddled on a bench in the railway station, my disdain sleeps in the mantle of my despondency . . .

. . . the world of dreamed images that makes up both my understanding and my life . . .

The scruple of the present moment neither weighs on me nor lasts within me. I hunger to extend time, and I want to be myself without any conditions.”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, from note 240 in Alfred Mac Adam’s translation, which is note 320 in Maria Aliete Galhoz & Teresa Sobral Cunha’s edition of the Livro do Desassossego.)

“I’m always horrified whenever I finish anything. Horrified and desolate. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me from ever finishing anything; it should in fact inhibit me from ever beginning. But I become distracted and do things. My accomplishments are not the product of my applied will but a giving away of my will. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have soul enough to stop things. This book is my cowardice.”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, from note 151 in Alfred Mac Adam’s translation, which is note 190 in Maria Aliete Galhoz & Teresa Sobral Cunha’s edition of the Livro do Desassossego.)

“A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.”

Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness, p.54