Literature and Words

By words the mind is winged.

Apt words have pow’r to swage The tumors of a troubled mind, And are as balm to fester’d wounds.

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of makingan after-dinner speech without the help ofpoetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.

We have one sap and one root—

[ Reply when asked to name the hundredbest books of all time :] I fear that would be impossible, because I have only written five.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slipquotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

We murder to dissect.

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

Go to a big book store that has lots of poetry books. Look them over and see if you find any affinity groups that you like among the magazines and publishing groups, people you dig or who might dig your mind. Send them your stuff.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. J. R. R.

The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

 

A louse in the locks of literature.

 

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

The matters I relate Are true lies. 3

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain.

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

“Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.

Write out of love; write out of instinct; write out of reason. But always for money.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think of what to do with the long winter evenings.

I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

The two cultures and the scientific revolution.