Literature and Words

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.

How do I know what I have to say until I see what I have said? E. M.

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imaginations, we learned to talk.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our own particular path than we have yet got ourselves. E. M.

 

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

 

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. J. R. R.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

 

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

 

“Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

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

THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH ADVERBS.

A louse in the locks of literature.

 

God-gifted organ-voice of England,

 

The two cultures and the scientific revolution.

 

There are various forms of production: artillery, automobiles, lorries. You also produce ‘commodities’, ‘works’, ‘products’. Such things are highly necessary. Engineering things. For people’s souls. ‘Products’ are highly necessary too. ‘Products’ are very important for people’s souls. You are engineers of human souls.

 

The two hours’ traffick of our stage.

 

His nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields.