Literature and Words

Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.

Just get the right syllable in the proper place.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Write with a smile, even when it’s horrible or tragic.

Every writer’s assumption is that he is as other human beings are, and that they are more or less as he is. There’s a principle of psychic unity. [Writing] was not meant to be an occult operation; it was not meant to be an esoteric secret.

You must write for children in the same way you do for adults, only better.

Write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you are writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted.

It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.

You write because you want to be read.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

I am convinced as a member of the reading public that bad [author] photographs are bad business. I have been put off reading books, which otherwise looked rather attractive, by the puss of the author printed on the back of the dust cover.

A word once let out of the cage cannot be whistled back again.

Yvetot [a small town in the north of France] is as good as Constantinople.

Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because it gives you perspective.

I don’t know enough words to have a style; I know, at the most, fifteen adjectives.

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

When you catch an adjective, kill it.

Altogether, the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; therefore, if any man wish to write a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any man would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Literature will neither yield thee bread, nor a stomach to digest bread with; quit it in God’s name .

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

As soon Seek roses in December—ice in June; Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff; Believe a woman or an epitaph, Or any other thing that’s false, before You trust in critics.

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.