Literature and Words

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many wiles.

My unpremeditated verse.

Means not, but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian’s so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad.

Better to err with Pope, than shine with Pye.

Whether thou choose Cervantes’ serious air, Or laugh and shake in Rabelais’ easy chair.

Vain was the chief’s, the sage’s pride! They had no poet, and they died. 7

Ev’n copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest art—the art to blot.

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia, Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings, Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus.

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses from a female mouth.

The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries. And every joke that’s possible has long ago been made.

There’s a great text in Galatians,

What I tell you three times is true.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works.

The true University of these days is a collection of books.

Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing.

Speech impelled us

Brevis esse laboro,

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Fred’s studies are not very deep … he is only reading a novel.

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory … In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.