Literature and Words

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Poetry is the purest of the language arts. It’s the tightest cage, and if you can get to sing in that cage it’s really really wonderful.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Poetry is life distilled.

A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It’s concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it.

A poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife, who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Or perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of the duck unserved.

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

How many of us have been incited to reason, have first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life by some dazzling aphorism.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing.

The metaphor is a shorter simile, or rather a kind of magical coat, by which the same idea assumes a thousand different appearances.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.