Literature and Words

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.

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.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

What the mulberry leaf is to the silkworm, the author’s book, treatise, essay, poem, is to the critical larvae that feed upon it. It furnishes them with food and clothing.

Although the novel exercises the rights of a created object, criticism has not those rights, and too many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own detriment as important edifices.

[Pjeople in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling.

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author.

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.