Literature and Words

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic.… Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he never so rudeliche and large, Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes new.

How long a time lies in one little word!

True wit is nature to advantage dress’d, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.

A Babylonish dialect Which learned pedants much affect.

Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.

But strength alone though of the Muses born Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn, Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchers Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs And thorns of life; forgetting the great end Of poesy, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.

Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach Of ordinary men.

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

The bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time.

This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me— The simple News that Nature told— With tender Majesty.

The poet is a little god.

So poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history, for while poetry is concerned with universal truth, history treats of particular facts.

History repeats itself; historians repeat one another.

‘Oh! it is only a novel! … only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda:’ or, in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. review of the Works of Pope (1847 ed.) in North British Review August 1848, vol. 9

Language is fossil poetry.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!

This figure that thou here seest put,

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Sir, I admit your gen’ral rule