Others

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

We do not seek for truth in the abstract. . . .

Set forth three children under the moon, three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo, done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.

As for me, I am a watercolor.

Only rhythm brings about a poetic short-circuit and transforms the copper into gold, the words into life.

Your Lordship will probably recollect where the Oriental tale occurs, of a Sultan who consulted Solomon on the proper inscription for a signet-ring, requiring that the maxim which it conveyed should be at once proper for moderating the presumption of prosperity and tempering the pressure of adversity. The apophthegm supplied by the Jewish sage was, I think, admirably adapted for both purposes, being comprehended in the words “And this also shall pass away.”

Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word “daffy-down-dilly.” It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a “daffy-down-dilly.” Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it.

[ Declining to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature :]

Art for art’s sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of the true, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

Art for art’s sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of the true, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Taste . . . is the only morality. . . . Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment—was the carver happy while he was about it?

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

A poet’s work. . . . To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.

The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.

I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.

I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.

All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.