Literature and Words

Fine writing is next to fine doing the top thing in the world.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Winged words.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (“as addled mosses dank”), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling.

How do I know what I have to say until I see what I have said? E. M.

There should be two main objects in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message, and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader’s attention or check his habitual pace of reading—he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase!

If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

When he was reading, he drew his eyes along over the leaves, and his heart searched into the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.

The troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Where words fail, music speaks.

The author’s character is read from title-page to end. Of this he never corrects the proofs.

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.

An excellent quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns the reader and seems to cry out to him: “Beware, I am the jewel and around me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!”

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—

Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry.