Literature and Words

There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.

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.

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

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

The two hours’ traffick of our stage.

 

[ Of Elizabethan drama :] The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

It’s not the basic I that the poet is after but the essential you.

 

O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

 

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books.

The best regimen is to get up early, insult yourself a bit in the shaving mirror, and then pretend you’re cutting wood.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he’s supposed to be doing.

I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time.… You’ve got to wait before you write about them.

Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made.

Ah yet, ere I descend to the grave May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, and many books, both true, Both wise, and both delightful too!

The land of spices; something understood.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply callisthenics with words.

Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.

When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,

A GOOD NOVEL TELLS US THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS HERO; BUT A BAD NOVEL TELLS US THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS AUTHOR.