Literature and Words

Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit.

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

It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.

The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.

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

I never saw an author in my life, saving perhaps one, that did not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat on having his fur smoothed the right way by a skillful hand.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; Carve every word before you let it fall.

I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

A good quotation must be a complete entity. It must be like a headline—sharp, clear, whole.

I pick up favorite quotations, and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.

You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on top of a hill; and the stone goes, starting others.

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.

The words “question” and “quest” are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth.

A sudden, bold, and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.

For me, a poet is someone who is “in contact.” Someone through whom a current is passing.

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.