Literature and Words

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

The important thing is that you make sure that neither the favorable nor the unfavorable critics move into your head and take part in the composition of your next work.

Never fear [the audience] or despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all … never, never, never bore the hell out of it.

A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.

Each of us is like a desert, and a literary work is like a cry from the desert, or like a pigeon let loose with a message in its claws, or like a bottle thrown into the sea. The point is: to be heard—even if by one single person.

Study yr keeds. Kids. There are a lot of poems there. But don’t write about yr kids. Write about the human, what’s left of him, where he’s going, what he dropped on the floor .

If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

The main rule of a writer is never to pity your manuscript. If you see something is no good, throw it away and begin again.

In the writing process, the more a thing cooks, the better.

It’s much more important to write than to be written about.

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote.

For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.

He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

Books are made not like children but like pyramids … and they’re just as useless! and they stay in the desert! … Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.