Literature and Words

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

I DOUBT THAT ART NEEDED RUSKIN ANY MORE THAN A MOVING TRAIN NEEDS ONE OF ITS PASSENGERS TO SHOVE IT.

EASY READING IS DAMN HARD WRITING.

DON’T TELL ME THE MOON IS SHINING; SHOW ME THE GLINT OF LIGHT ON BROKEN GLASS.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

A SEQUEL IS AN ADMISSION THAT YOU’VE BEEN REDUCED TO IMITATING YOURSELF.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

A GOOD NOVEL TELLS US THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS HERO; BUT A BAD NOVEL TELLS US THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS AUTHOR.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.

Do but take care to express yourself in a plain, easy Manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent Terms, and to give a harmonious and pleasing turn to your periods.

I understand Jung’s vague, imprecise notions, but I consider them worthless—a lot of talk without any clear direction. If there has to be a psychiatrist, I should prefer Freud. I do not believe in him, but I love very much his concise style and his original, although rather extravagant, mind.

Shaw is undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest figures. I once said of him that his plays remind me of Mozart. There is not one superfluous word in Shaw’s prose, just as there is not one superfluous note in Mozart’s" music.

Autobiographies mostly arise out of narcissism or negative feelings toward others. Biographies from the pen of another person tend in their psychological traits to reflect the intellectual and spiritual nature of the writer more than that of the person portrayed.

Isn’t all of philosophy like writing in honey? It looks wonderful at first sight, but when you look again it is all gone. Only the smear is left.

Never forget what I believe was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.

It may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.