Literature and Words

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

The best fame is a writer’s fame: it’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough that you get interrupted when you eat.

Good prose is like a window-pane.

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of heaven’s joy, Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice, and Verse.

And he, whose fustian’s so sublimely bad,

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The younger generation is knocking at the door, and as I open it there steps spritely in the incomparable Max.

It may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.

Isn’t all of philosophy like writing in honey? It looks wonderful at first sight, but when you look again it is all gone. Only the smear is left.

A SEQUEL IS AN ADMISSION THAT YOU’VE BEEN REDUCED TO IMITATING YOURSELF.

People who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature.

DON’T TELL ME THE MOON IS SHINING; SHOW ME THE GLINT OF LIGHT ON BROKEN GLASS.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.

One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Each man’s memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

There are books . . . which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.

At the touch of love, Everyone becomes a poet.

When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers it’s research.

Belief in form but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming.