Literature and Words

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

The state should, I think, be called “Anaesthesia.” This signifies insensibility. . . . The adjective will be “Anaesthetic.” Thus we might say the state of Anaesthesia, or the anaesthetic state.

 

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherazade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges of mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency … to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Now this is very important and can hardly be emphasized too strongly: You have decided to write at four o’clock, and at four o’clock write you must!

There really are no characters in plays; there are relationships . Where there are only characters and no relationships, we have an unsatisfactory play.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

One of the great rules of art: do not linger.

There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.

The terror of the white page in the typewriter.

Readers of biographies like their meat rare.

The hardest thing about writing, in a sense, is not writing. I mean, the sentence is not intended to show you off, you know. It is not supposed to be “Look at me!” “Look, no hands!” It’s supposed to be a pipeline between the reader and you. One condition of the sentence is to write so well that no one notices that you’re writing.

Go, and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot. Teach me to hear mermaids singing.

I don’t like to throw characters into a plot as though it were a raging torrent where they are swept along. What interests me are the complications and nuances of character. Few of my characters are described externally; we see them from the inside out.

With just enough of learning to misquote.

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain.

Time that with this strange excuse

Shakespeare unlocked his heart,’ once more!

My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

Hear the voice of the Bard!