Literature and Words

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

 

But, for the unquiet heart and brain A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

 

And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long That on the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever.

 

Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still.

 

O reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all, As in oure tong ane flour imperiall, That raise in Britane evir, quho redis rycht, Thou beris of makaris the triumph riall. 3

 

Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do my job for me?”

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books.

Another ancient and extensive class of languages, united by a greater number of resemblances than can well be altogether accidental, may be denominated the Indo-european, comprehending the Indian, the West Asiatic, and almost all the European languages.

We murder to dissect.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slipquotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

When, however, one reads of a witch beingducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of awise woman selling herbs, or even of a veryremarkable man who had a mother, then Ithink we are on the track of a lost novelist, asuppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashedher brains out on the moor or mopped andmowed about the highways crazed with thetorture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, Iwould venture to guess that Anon, who wroteso many poems without signing them, wasoften a woman.

[ Of Elizabethan drama :] The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

[ Of James Joyce’s Ulysses:] Never did I readsuch tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we willlet them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th—merelythe scratching of pimples on the body of thebootboy at Claridges.

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! . . . I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintingsand other works exist only to illustrate the text .

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt .

[ Reply when asked to name the hundredbest books of all time :] I fear that would be impossible, because I have only written five.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence. . . . In the afternoon, I put it back again.

Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry.

Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

[George] Meredith’s a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as medium for writing in prose.