Literature and Words

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Autobiographies mostly arise out of narcissism or negative feelings toward others. Biographies from the pen of another person tend in their psychological traits to reflect the intellectual and spiritual nature of the writer more than that of the person portrayed.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

THE PERSON, BE IT GENTLEMAN OR LADY, WHO HAS NOT PLEASURE IN A GOOD NOVEL, MUST BE INTOLERABLY STUPID.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting.

The metaphor is a shorter simile, or rather a kind of magical coat, by which the same idea assumes a thousand different appearances.

The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners. Only that, nothing more—a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

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.

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

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.

Par ma foi! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j’en susse rien .

Wit invents ; inspiration reveals .

But, for the unquiet heart and brain A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

 

There are various forms of production: artillery, automobiles, lorries. You also produce ‘commodities’, ‘works’, ‘products’. Such things are highly necessary. Engineering things. For people’s souls. ‘Products’ are highly necessary too. ‘Products’ are very important for people’s souls. You are engineers of human souls.

 

O reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all, As in oure tong ane flour imperiall, That raise in Britane evir, quho redis rycht, Thou beris of makaris the triumph riall. 3

 

The Literary “Fellow Travelers” of the Revolution.

What if one does say the same things,—of course in a little different form each time,—over and over? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans.