Literature and Words

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make abody of more or less connected legend, rangingfrom the large and cosmogonic, to the level ofromantic fairy-story—the larger founded onthe lesser in contact with the earth, the lesserdrawing splendor from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate simply to: to England; tomy country.

 

Mastering the lawless science of our law,

 

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That’s why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones.

 

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

 

The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them. . . . The traditional culture . . . is, of course, mainly literary . . . the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive.

 

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.

 

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

 

The truth is, that the law is always approaching, and never reaching, consistency. It is forever adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off. It will become entirely consistent only when it ceases to grow.

 

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.

 

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.

 

The state should, I think, be called “Anaesthesia.” This signifies insensibility. . . . The adjective will be “Anaesthetic.” Thus we might say the state of Anaesthesia, or the anaesthetic state.

 

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

 

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

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

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

What if one does say the same things,—of course in a little different form each time,—over and over? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.