Literature and Words

Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong. That is a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady.

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.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

There really are no characters in plays; there are relationships . Where there are only characters and no relationships, we have an unsatisfactory play.

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

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader’s arm, like a drunk, and say, “And then I did this and it was so interesting.”

Advice to young sportswriters: Read. And think. But as little as possible about sports.

Readers of biographies like their meat rare.

[The] three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful: 1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot. 2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it. 3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency … to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

A note: despair at the badness of the book; can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord know the truth.

Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.

The editor is a specialist about reading. His specialty is what is sufficiently general and common between a possible readership and what the author has to say. The tool he works with is himself. If the author cannot reach him, he can’t reach the editor’s readership either.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

American writers drink when they are “blocked” and drunkenness—being a kind of substitute for art—makes the block worse.

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

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

I really don’t want to encourage younger writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. Do they talk about encouraging younger actresses? No. You don’t want any younger actress to come along and outshine you.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do … is to write as little as possible.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

To write successful dialogue the author must have access to the mind of all his characters, but the reader must not perceive any more than he would in real life.