"Whenever he wrote of literature, Melville tended to write about the process of writing in general, and his own in particular."
--Frederick Busch on "Melville's Mail" in A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life (St. Martin's Press, 1998).
"And D'Israeli, the
younger, the sparkler! whose first book is his best and is immortal. I
read, an odd volume of Vivian Grey every year.
"And Lever!—the bright coiner—so they say—of other men's ore!
"And Cooper! the American Scott, who still more than his model, wrote his brain as dry as a broken ink stand!
-- Scenes Beyond the Western Border, September 1851
... I hope I shall never write such a book again -- Tho' when a poor devil writes with duns all round him, & looking over the back of his chair -- & perching on his pen & diving in his inkstand -- like the devils about St: Anthony -- what can you expect of that poor devil? -- What but a beggarly Redburn! --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, December 14 1849
"... those treacherous plague-spots of
indigence—videlicet, blots from the inkstand;"
-- Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities
"The difficulty was, he was apt to be altogether too energetic.
There was a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him. He would be
incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand. All his blots upon my documents, were dropped
there after twelve o'clock, meridian." -- Bartleby, the Scrivener in Putnam's Monthly for November 1853
