Literature and Words

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

 

A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.

Say it, no ideas but in things.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:

And even I can remember

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word.

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir ThomasBrowne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann.

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence. . . . In the afternoon, I put it back again.

Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one “Sordello.”

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.

Philologists, who chase

Poems are made by fools like me,

‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ … ‘Yes,’ said the Managing Editor. ‘That must be good style.’

War is what happens when language fails.

Un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route .

Every novelist ought to invent his own technique.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.

Take eloquence and wring its neck! 4

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not. But that doesn’t bother me anymore. I tell my students there is such a thing as “writer’s block,” and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.