Literature and Words

Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale.

American writers drink when they are “blocked” and drunkenness—being a kind of substitute for art—makes the block worse.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Very much of a novelist’s work must appertain to the intercourse between young men and young women.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore .

The editor is a specialist about reading. His specialty is what is sufficiently general and common between a possible readership and what the author has to say. The tool he works with is himself. If the author cannot reach him, he can’t reach the editor’s readership either.

How many bards gild the lapses of time!

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.

And all else is literature. 5

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

Ut pictura poesis.

Etiam disiecti membra poetae.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, is a rose.

Books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

I understand Jung’s vague, imprecise notions, but I consider them worthless—a lot of talk without any clear direction. If there has to be a psychiatrist, I should prefer Freud. I do not believe in him, but I love very much his concise style and his original, although rather extravagant, mind.

Do but take care to express yourself in a plain, easy Manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent Terms, and to give a harmonious and pleasing turn to your periods.