Literature and Words

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation, not overturning it.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift, and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

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

To read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.

There are books . . . which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

A day when I do not write tastes of ashes.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

My stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg— I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals . . . he seeks to establish a relationship.

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

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

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.

Apt words have pow’r to swage The tumors of a troubled mind, And are as balm to fester’d wounds.

The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Words are like leaves, some wither every year, And every year a younger race succeeds.