Literature and Words

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his.

[ Of James Joyce’s Ulysses:] Never did I readsuch tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we willlet them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th—merelythe scratching of pimples on the body of thebootboy at Claridges.

Although the novel exercises the rights of a created object, criticism has not those rights, and too many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own detriment as important edifices.

His nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields.

 

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a Way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health.

If you would not be forgotten, As soon as you are dead and rotten, Either write things worthy reading, Or do things worth the writing.

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.

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.

 

A sentence may be as long as the writer pleases, provided that he confines it to a single connected range of ideas, and by careful punctuation prevents the reader from finding it either tedious or confusing.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.

Who says that fictions only and false hair

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

The famous rules, which the French call Des Trots Onitez, or, the Three Unities, which ought to be observed in every regular play; namely, of Time, Place, and Action.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

Look out how you use proud words. When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.