Literature and Words

The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.

[George] Meredith’s a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as medium for writing in prose.

You don’t know about me, without you haveread a book by the name of “The Adventuresof Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. Thatbook was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he toldthe truth, mainly.

[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.

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.

[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.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Writing fails because the writer does not know enough about his material. If he knows enough he will feel enough.

Advice to young sportswriters: Read. And think. But as little as possible about sports.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.

That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

One of the amusements of being old is that I have no illusions about my literary position. I have been taken very seriously, but I have also seen essays by clever young men on contemporary fiction who would never think of considering me. I no longer mind what people think. On the whole, I have done what I set out to do. Now my age makes everyone take me very seriously. If you are a writer, live a long time. I have found that longevity counts more than talent.

T HE BEST ADVICE on writing I’ve ever received: Miss Stein said, “The way to say it is to say it.”

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for the money.

People don’t like using dictionaries when they’re reading mere novels.