Literature and Words

To read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.

I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte .

I get a little Verlaine

When, however, one reads of a witch beingducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of awise woman selling herbs, or even of a veryremarkable man who had a mother, then Ithink we are on the track of a lost novelist, asuppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashedher brains out on the moor or mopped andmowed about the highways crazed with thetorture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, Iwould venture to guess that Anon, who wroteso many poems without signing them, wasoften a woman.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like—then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

BOOKS DON’T NEED BATTERIES.

The tourist archipelagoes of my South are prisons too, corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing verse, what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

Poetry is life distilled.

The difference between the almost -right word& the right word is really a large matter—it’sthe difference between the lightning-bug & thelightning.

Toutes les histoires anciennes, comme le disait un de nos beaux esprits, ne sont que des fables convenues .

Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui le cou .

A word after a word after a word is power.

Expressions such as “the former, the latter, the first, the second” should be used as seldom as possible: they are invitations to the reader’s eye to travel back—and it should be encouraged always to read straight on at an even pace.

… Je me suis baigné dans le Poème

Oone should alwayd be drunk… With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you choose. but get drunk

[ When asked about the most beautiful words in the English language :] The ones I like . . . are “cheque” and “inclosed.”

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

At non effugies meos iambos.

 

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.

The solitude of writing is … quite frightening. It’s close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

Only rhythm brings about a poetic short-circuit and transforms the copper into gold, the words into life.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.