Selected literature quotes

1. Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

2. Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

3. He was not of an age, but for all time.

4. If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: 'Byron is dead!'

5. Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

6. Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.

7. To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.

8. The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

9. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

10. Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.

11. Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

12. Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

13. Some books makes me want to go adventuring, others feel that they have saved me the trouble.

14. Great is bookishness and the charm of books.

15. I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

16. Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

17. I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.

18. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

19. Fantasy is literature for teenagers.

20. All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

21. In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?

22. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

23. Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

24. I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

25. So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

26. Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

27. There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

28. Literature is analysis after the event.

29. You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

30. There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

31. Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

32. What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

33. The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.

34. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.

35. It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

36. Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

37. A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

38. There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!

39. And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

40. And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.

41. I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.

42. After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct.

43. If I say that Nabokov, who was educated in England... turns out to be a master of English prose - the most extraordinary phenomenon of the kind since Conrad - this is likely to sound incredible. If I say that Nabokov is something like Proust, something like Franz Kafka, and, probably something like Gogol, I shall suggest an imitative patchwork, where Nabokov is as completely himself as any of these others - a man with a unique sensibility and a unique story to tell.

44. Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book - all right then - a great book.

45. Lolita is pornography, and we do not plan to review it.

46. The political barbarism of the century made him an exile, a wanderer, a Hotelmensch, not only from his Russian homeland but from the matchless Russian tongue in which his genius would have found its unforced idiom... But I have no hesitation in arguing that this poly-linguistic matrix is the determining fact of Nabokov's life and art. But whereas so many other language exiles clung desperately to the artifice of their native tongue or fell silent, Nabokov moved into successive languages like a travelling potentate...

47. Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world.

48. All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny, even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all.

49. Ainsi presque tout est imitation. L'idee des Lettres persanes est prise de celle de l'Espion turc. Le Boiardo a imite le Pulci, l'Arioste a imite le Boiardo. Les esprits les plus originaux empruntent les uns des autres.

50. Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village.

51. Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations - that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling.

52. Of course it [football] is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi.

53. It is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as 'revolutionary' - and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down - as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like 'I wander through each charter'd street' than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.

54. Ah! Whither, whither shall I fly, A poor unhappy Maid; To hopeless Love and Misery By my own Heart betray'd?

55. Sweet stream that winds through yonder glade, Apt emblem of a virtuous maid Silent and chaste she steals along, Far from the world's gay busy throng: With gentle yet prevailing force, Intent upon her destined course; Graceful and useful all she does, Blessing and blest where'er she goes; Pure-bosom'd as that watery glass, And Heaven reflected in her face.

56. They told me how Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.

57. Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.

58. The poet:who is the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world.

59. Thackeray is everybody's past - is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed forever in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at once the hundred ghosts of oneself.

60. I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh... they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page.

61. There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.

62. It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.

63. I have long known of Mr. Shaw, read his plays and prefaces, and loved him. I admire heroic effort. Accomplishment I love. What I am about to say is no invention, and I am putting it down for whatever it may be worth to the historian of literature and for the student of influences of men on men, and because it is true and must therefore be made known. As a boy, charging pell-mell through literature, reading everything I could lay hands on in the Public Library of Fresno, I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful - especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken - but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned.

64. Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that. Young Shaw, hello out there.

65. But Shakespear's Magick could not copy'd be, Within that Circle none durst walk but he.

66. I never quite despair and I read Shakspeare - indeed I shall I think never read any other Book much [...] I am very near Agreeing with Hazlit that Shakspeare is enough for us.

67. He has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing.

68. Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.

69. Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's; Therefore on him no speech!

70. The verbal poetic texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays.

71. His poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet.

72. In my mind, he was guilty of no error he - was chargeable with no exaggeration - he was betrayed by his fancy into no metaphor, who once said that all we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve men into a box.

73. But, as it is, this pied collection begs your indulgence - it's been spun from threads both sad and humoristic, themes popular or idealistic, products of carefree hours, of fun, of sleeplessness, faint inspirations, of powers unripe, or on the wane, of reason's icy intimations, and records of a heart in pain.

74. 'The bread of the stranger is bitter,' says Dante, 'and his staircase hard to climb.' But who can know what the bitterness of dependence is so well as the poor companion of an old lady of quality?

75. 'O frate,' disse, 'chesti qu'io ti cerno col ditto,' e addito un spirto innanzi, 'fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno. Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi soverchio tutti; e lascia dir li stolti che quel di Lemosi credon ch'avanzi.

76. Fra tutti il primo Arnaldo Daniello Gran maestro d'amor; ch'a la sua terra Ancor fa onor col suo dir strano e bello.

77. Here's a tip I've never used: I understand you can learn a great deal of girldom by reading Pride and Prejudice, and I own a copy, but I have never read it. I tried. It was given to me by a girl with a little not inside that read: What is in this book is the heart of a woman. I am sure the heart of a woman is pure and lovely, but the first chapter of said heart is hopelessly boring.

78. [He] hath shewed himselfe singular in the immortall Epitaph of his beloved Astrophell, besides many other most absolute Comike inventions.

79. Literature is the new foreplay.

80. For pointed satire I would Buckhurst choose, The best good man with the worst-natured muse.

81. I have understood and felt that world literature is no longer an abstract anthology, nor a generalization invented by literary historians; it is rather a certain common body and a common spirit, a living heartfelt unity reflecting the growing unity of mankind. State frontiers still turn crimson, heated by electric wire and bursts of machine fire; and various ministries of internal affairs still think that literature too is an 'internal affair' falling under their jurisdiction; newspaper headlines still display: 'No right to interfere in our internal affairs!' Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East. And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today - to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see. Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language - the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit.

82. 'Why, if man rot in dreamless ease, Should that plain fact, as taught by these, Not make him sure that he shall cease? 'Who forged that other influence, That heat of inward evidence, By which he doubts against the sense? 'He owns the fatal gift of eyes, That read his spirit blindly wise, Not simple as a thing that dies. 'Here sits he shaping wings to fly: His heart forebodes a mystery: He names the name Eternity. 'That type of Perfect in his mind In Nature can he nowhere find. He sows himself in every wind. 'He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend, And thro' thick veils to apprehend A labour working to an end. 'The end and the beginning vex His reason: many things perplex, With motions, checks, and counterchecks. 'He knows a baseness in his blood At such strange war with something good, He may not do the thing he would. 'Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn. Vast images in glimmering dawn, Half shown, are broken and withdrawn. 'Ah! sure within him and without, Could his dark wisdom find it out, There must be answer to his doubt.

83. Pigeon Post Title page and Chapter 4), 1936

84. Denise Levertov: The American Poet from Britain

85. This hero and villain no more understand Krazy Kat than the mythical denizens of a two dimensional realm understand some three dimensional intruder. The world of Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse is a knowledgeable power-world, in terms of which our unknowledgeable heroine is powerlessness personified. The sensical law of this world is might makes right; the nonsensical law of our heroine is love conquers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Puppers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp (each completely convinced that his own particular brand of might makes right) are simple-minded - Krazy isn't - therefore, to Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse, Krazy is. But if both our hero and our villain don't and can't understand our heroine, each of them can and each of them does misunderstand her differently. To our softhearted altruist, she is the adorably helpless incarnation of saintliness. To our hardhearted egoist, she is the puzzlingly indestructible embodiment of idiocy. The benevolent overdog sees her as an inspired weakling. The malevolent undermouse views her as a born target. Meanwhile Krazy Kat, through this double misunderstanding, fulfills her joyous destiny.

86. Book review: Aphorisms by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

87. I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful - especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken - but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned. ... I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective - when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right - has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle. ... I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself - of what I really was and would surely become - was George Bernard Shaw.

88. Decline of the English Murder

89. Though he was a strong believer in individual difference and came to fear, above all, the thought that people would become interchangeable parts in a totalitarian system, he seems to have felt that as a subject for study himself he was a universal, i.e., a fair sample of his kind, capable of normative reactions under dissection. His end has something macabre in it, like the end of some Victorian pathologist who tested his theories on his own organs, neglecting asepsis. In his last letters, he speaks of his appearance as being 'frightening,' of being a 'death's head,' but all along he has been something of a specter at the feast. He was prone to see the handwriting on the wall, for England, for socialism, for personal liberty; indeed, his work is one insistent reminder, and his personal life - what we glimpse of it - even when he was fairly affluent seems to have been an illustrated lesson in survival techniques under extreme conditions, as though he expected to be cast adrift in a capsule.

90. The question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix? The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, 'The Principles of Newspeak' is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.

91. Then soon after my delight with Stein was jolted; a political critic of the reddest persuasion condemned Stein in a newspaper article, calling her decadent, implying that she reclined upon a silken couch in Paris smoking hashish day and night and was a hopeless prey to hallucinations. I asked myself if I were wrong or crazy or decadent. Being simple minded, I decided upon a very practical way of determining the worth of the prose of Stein, a prose I had accepted without qualms or distress. I gathered a group of semi-illiterate Negro workers into a Chicago basement and read them Melanctha aloud. They were enthralled, interrupting me constantly to tell where and when they had met such a strange and melancholy gal. I was convinced and Miss Stein's book never bothered or frightened me after that. If Negro stockyard workers could understand the stuff when it was read aloud to them, then surely anybody else could if they wanted to read with their ears as well as their eyes. For the prose of Stein is but the repetitive contemporaneousness of our living speech woven into a grammarless form of narrative...

92. The 'Laforgue edition' (1826-1838), heavily rewritten and censored:

93. The H. P. Lovecraft Archive

94. Essay on Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi

95. The HP Lovecraft Historical Society

96. Observer review of Houellebecq's HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life + Extract

97. Essays by Harriet Martineau at Quotidiana.org

98. Some times feeling like Holden Caulfield, sometimes Jack Kerouac

99. You don't know what I'm all about Like killing cops and reading Kerouac

100. Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves, unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their liposuction. 'I have never belonged to this race,' said Rimbaud.