Literature and Words

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

Books are immortal sons defying their sires.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Art extends each man’s short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men’s lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Tel qu’en Lui-Même enfin l’éternité le change .

Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.

All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.

I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.

Things severed shall be united and shall acquire of themselves such virtue that they shall restore to men their lost memory: That is the papyrus sheets, which are formed out of several strips and preserve the memory of the thoughts and deeds of men.

Study me, reader, if you delight in me, because on very few occasions shall I return to the world, and because the patience for this profession is found in very few, and only in those who wish to compose things anew. Come, oh men, to see the miracles that such studies will disclose to nature.

...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

Use the right word, not its second cousin.

And how moving is the eloquence of the untaught when it is the heart that is speaking!

Definite speech means clarity of mind.

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.