Literature and Words

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Nothing lays itself open to the charge of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.

Yes, there is a nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.

Where words fail, music speaks.

When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers it’s research.

Art extends each man’s short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men’s lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.