Who Said It? Writers and Musicians Quiz

Question: “The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, moldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.”

Answer: “The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, moldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the 19th century.

Question: “Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”

Answer: “Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.” American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was a leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism.

Question: “If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.”

Answer: “If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.” American-born writer Henry James is known for novels like Daisy Miller and The Bostonians.

Question: “Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.”

Answer: “Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.” English poet, dramatist, and critic Ben Jonson, who was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, is known for such plays as Every Man in His Humour.

Question: “Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.”

Answer: “Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.” American dramatist Tennessee Williams is known for plays like The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Question: “One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!”

Answer: “One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!” American writer Herman Melville is known especially for his novel Moby Dick.

Question: “If art can reveal the truth, art can also lie. An artist can be not only divinely inspired, but diabolically inspired.”

Answer: “If art can reveal the truth, art can also lie. An artist can be not only divinely inspired, but diabolically inspired.” Irish writer George Bernard Shaw is known for plays like Pygmalion and Saint Joan.

Question: “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”

Answer: “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” American writer William Faulkner is known for such novels as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.

Question: “Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

Answer: “Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” British author Roald Dahl is known for children’s novels like James and the Giant Peach and The BFG.

Question: “Lies, injustice, and hypocrisy are a part of every ordinary community. Most people achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they didn’t, they couldn’t endure.”

Answer: “Lies, injustice, and hypocrisy are a part of every ordinary community. Most people achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they didn’t, they couldn’t endure.” Nella Larsen, a Harlem Renaissance writer known for the novels Quicksand and Passing, was the first Black woman to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Question: “Write while the heat is in you.…The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”

Answer: “Write while the heat is in you.…The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.” American writer Henry David Thoreau is known especially for Walden, a memoir about living alone in nature.

Question: “Works of art are our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”

Answer: “Works of art are our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” English-born poet and man of letters W.H. Auden is known for poems such as “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “Lullaby,” and “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.”

Question: “I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.”

Answer: “I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.” American author Louisa May Alcott is known for her children’s books, especially the classic Little Women.

Question: “To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to hell.”

Answer: “To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to hell.” Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky is known for pieces like The Rite of Spring and The Firebird.

Question: “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

Answer: “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.” American writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is known for novels exploring the Black female experience, including The Bluest Eye and Beloved.