Literature and Words

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music and silence.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade.

A different language is a different vision of life.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Yes, there is a nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur. . . . This life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realized within the confines of a book! How happy would be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him!

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! . . . I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintingsand other works exist only to illustrate the text .

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent too. Words are used to disguise, notto illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

I know of only one rule: style cannot be too clear , too simple .

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; personsattempting to find a moral in it will bebanished; persons attempting to find a plot in itwill be shot.

Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do my job for me?”

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

 

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

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

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.