Literature and Words

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.

 

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

 

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

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

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

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

[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.

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.

What if one does say the same things,—of course in a little different form each time,—over and over? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a Way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

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 great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

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

The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game.

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

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

[I]t is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

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.

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.