"Personality is much more than autobiographical detail, it’s our way of processing the world, our way..."

“Personality is much more than autobiographical detail, it’s our way of processing the world, our way of being, and it cannot be artificially removed from our activities; it is our way of being active. Eliot may have been ruthlessly impersonal in his writing in the superficial sense (if by that we mean he did not reveal personal details, such as the tricky fact that he had committed his wife to an asylum), but never was a man’s work more inflected with his character, with his beliefs about the nature of the world. As for that element of his work that he puts forward as a model of his impersonality - a devotion to tradition - such devotion is the very definition of personality in writing. The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.”

- Zadie Smith, in her essay, “Fail better.”
(In response to T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)