"I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk.
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.
Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt's eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say that they haven't time to read.
This book is not to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.
In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.
Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
The first draft of anything is shit.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness
Read in order to live.
Dort, wo man B¸cher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.)
I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.
If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.
What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
Not all who wander are lost.
The pen is mightier than the sword, but no one is worthy to pull it from the stone.
When I'm near the end of a book, I need to sleep in the same room with it.
I never delighted much in comtemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measuring symbols; but now... if I attempt to look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way, among the nebulae, those mighty orbs, and stupendous orbits of suns, planets, satellites, and comets which compose incomprehensible universe; and if I don't sink into nothing in my own estimation, I feel an irrestistible impulse to fall on my knees, in adoration of the power that moves, wisdom that directs, and the benevolence that santifies the whole.
He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carrol was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
But spectacles have a function, and they function only when you put them on, to look through them at the world. It is the same with language. That is to say, one shouldn't waste one's life in spectacle-cleaning or talking about language, or in trying to get a clear view of our language, or of 'our conceptual scheme'. The fundamental thing about human languages is that they can and should be used to describe something; and this something is, somehow, the world.
For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.
Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue--where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into common forms of premeditated talk--otherwise they will bore the house and not entertain it.
You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere is a fool. My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being,the way I am made. I do not contradict them, and would not even if I wished to. For my system, which you disapprove of is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness -it means more to me than my life itself.
I write of the great eternal truths that bind all men together the whole world over. We eat, we shit, we fuck, we kill, and we die.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.† You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
The writer is odd from day one and in the course of pursuing this maddening profession becomes distinctly odder... It is not unusual for a successful writer - your favorite, the one you think of as full of sunshine, wisdom and laughter - to spend great portions of his or her life in a state of fury, hideously disappointed, or even raving mad... for a writer it is almost essential to pursue a solitary passion in the open air.
I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
We have the power to bore people long after we are dead.
THIS DRINK'S GOT MAGGOTS IN IT. "That's not a maggot, sir. It's a worm." OH, THAT'S BETTER, IS IT? "It's supposed to be there, sir. They put the worm in to show how strong it is." STRONG ENOUGH TO DROWN WORMS? "It's just something people drink." Death picked up the bottle and held it up to what normally would have been eye level. The worm rotated forlornly. WHAT'S IT LIKE? he said. "Well, it's sort of-" I WASN'T TALKING TO YOU.
Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.
Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomíd caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember but the story.
"There are two kinds of people in this world; those who think there are two kinds of people and those who are smart enough to know better"
"Careful with fire" is good advise we know. "Careful with words" is ten times doubly so.
[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
"Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left..
