Literature and Words

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

“N EVER READ a book, Johnnie, and you will be a rich man.”

You have to saturate yourself with English poetry in order to compose English prose.

A sentence may be as long as the writer pleases, provided that he confines it to a single connected range of ideas, and by careful punctuation prevents the reader from finding it either tedious or confusing.

Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.

The author makes his readers, just as he makes his characters.

The man who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

There should be two main objects in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message, and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader’s attention or check his habitual pace of reading—he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader … by either the author or the people in the tale. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate.

For the love of God don’t condescend! Don’t assume the attitude of saying, “See how clever I am, and what fun everybody else is!”

An author who assures you that he writes for himself alone and that he does not care whether he is heard or not is a boaster and is deceiving either himself or you.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health.

A man of letters may have a mistress who makes books, but he must have a wife who makes shirts.

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young.

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

The writer must be a psychologist, but a secret one; he must sense and know the roots of phenomena, but offer only the phenomena themselves as they blossom or wither.

I know everything. One has to, to write decently.

Go to a big book store that has lots of poetry books. Look them over and see if you find any affinity groups that you like among the magazines and publishing groups, people you dig or who might dig your mind. Send them your stuff.

Burn proofs when read. You shall have the book on publication .