Quotes from
Stephen Crane

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"I can't do any sort of work that I don't like or don't feel like doing, and I've given up trying to do it."
Letter to J. Herbert Welch, 1896

"It[The Red Badge of Courage] was an effort born of pain—despair, almost; and I believe that this made it a better piece of literature than it otherwise would have been. It seems a pity that art should be a child of pain, and yet I think it is. Of course we have fine writers who are prosperous and contented, but in my opinion their work would be greater if this were not so. It lacks the sting it would have if written under the spur of a great need."
Letter to J. Herbert Welch, 1896

"Where did you get all that rot? Yarns[stories or novels] aren't done by mathematics. You can't do it by rule any more than you can dance by rule. You have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers . . ."
Conversation with Willa Cather from
"When I Knew Stephen Crane" by Cather

"I haven't time to learn to spell. I haven't time to dress either; it takes an awful slice out of a fellow's life."
Conversation with Willa Cather from
"When I Knew Stephen Crane" by Cather

"None of them knew the color of the sky."
1st sentence from "The Open Boat"

Sources:

Crane, Stephen, The Red Badge of Courage and Four Stories, A Signet Classic, published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., New York, 1997.

Ford, Ford Madox, Portraits from Life, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1937.

Stephen Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Maurice Bassan, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967.

Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage: Bloom's Notes, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, a division of Main Line Book Co., 1996.