Literature and Words

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

I pick up favorite quotations, and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

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

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.

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Et tout le reste est littérature .

Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still.

 

The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages in a book.

Arma virumque cano .

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

 

God-gifted organ-voice of England,

 

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude.