Literature and Words

I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.

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 economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife, who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Or perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of the duck unserved.

The only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.

There is no such thing as “the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.

One of those “Two Cultures” is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is B-grade novels, ideological fiction, popular art. Who cares if there exists a gap between such “physics” and such “humanities”?

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

 

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

 

Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds towards heaven : That is by letters written with their quills.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug .

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

The truth is, that the law is always approaching, and never reaching, consistency. It is forever adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off. It will become entirely consistent only when it ceases to grow.

 

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story .

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one’s way of taking a fact.

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.