Literature and Words

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance.

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

And he, whose fustian’s so sublimely bad,

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

Sir, I admit your gen’ral rule

When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man.

I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply callisthenics with words.

If, with the literate, I am

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Good prose is like a window-pane.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

It could be said of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together.

Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism;

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense.

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

The troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.

Rhyme being … but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre.