Literature and Words

By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift, and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.

There are books . . . which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

To read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

A day when I do not write tastes of ashes.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

My stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg— I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals . . . he seeks to establish a relationship.

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

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners. Only that, nothing more—a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality.

The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

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

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Words are like leaves, some wither every year, And every year a younger race succeeds.

By words the mind is winged.

Words easy to be understood do often hit the mark, when high and learned ones do only pierce the air.

There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.