I have read at various times much indifferent verse and much execrable verse, but I can conscientiously say that The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased is the most damnable piece of flatness that has ever fallen in my way.
All art is unstable. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.
— David Bowie via The Guardian.
The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them. —Rachel Maddow
Feminism is itself a challenge. Feminism is a challenge to the way things are in the world. It is by definition an oppositional movement, because it’s trying to accomplish something. I’ve never felt like feminism was a consciousness raising effort in isolation. Everything about feminism is about getting something in the world to get better for women, and to get the world to be less stupid on gender bifurcation terms. I think that feminism over time gets better, or it gets better and worse and better and worse at achieving the goals that it’s trying to achieve, but the overall mission stays the same. I guess I don’t think of it as feminism versus anti-feminism; I sort of think of it as feminism versus the world. I don’t think of it as a competition; there’s no winning. In feminism, you’re always trying to make stuff better. It’s opposition to which you cannot attribute a tally. —Rachel Maddow
I get a fine, warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.
[I now] suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet, or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom.
The New York Review of Science Fiction. "Editorial 192." David Hartwell. January, 2008.
[I now] suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet, or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom.John Leonard in The New York Times, quoted in The New York Review of Science Fiction. “Editorial 192.” David Hartwell. January, 2008.
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
—Octavia E. Butler
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."
Orthodoxy. (1908) by G. K. Chesterton
To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. (1863–1944) On the Art of Writing. 1916.
I give you C. S. Lewis in "On Stories," at the part where he talks about "narrative lust":
The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness…In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the "surprise" is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff. So in literature. We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the "surprise" of discovering that what seemed Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia.
(C. S. Lewis. On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature. 17
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
—H.L. Mencken. Prejudices, First Series. 1919.
Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
—H. L. Mencken 1880 - 1956
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostituteRebecca West
. . . inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
Robert Frost
Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
Robert Frost
Speketh not in the heigh style, but so playn at this time,
I yow preye, that we may understonde what ye saye.
The Host to the Clerke of Oxenforde. Chaucer. Canterbury Tales. c. 1400.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest
Mark Twain
In cuiuscumque maibus libellus iste venerit, rogo et cum grandi humilitate supplico, ut eum et ipse frequentius legat, et aliis ad legendum et ad transscribendum non solum tradat, sed etiam ingerat, ut et de suis et aliorum profectibus duplicem a Domino remunerationem recipiat. Hoc ideo suggero, quia multi sunt, et forte aliqui religiosi, qui plures libros et satis nitidos et pulchre ligatos habere volunt, et eos ita armariis clausos tenent, ut illos nec ipsi legant, nec aliis ad legendum tribuant: ignorantes quod nihil prodest libros habere, et eos propter mundi huius inpedimenta non legere. Liber enim bene coopertus et nitidus, si non legatur, non facit animam nitidam; ille enim qui iugiter legitur, et pro eo quod saepe revolvitur pulcher a foris esse non potest, pulchram animam intus facit.
Caesarius, bishop of Arles, sermo 2 (after ca. 506) by way of Dr. Carol Lanham
"First they came for the verbs and I said nothing, for verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns and I speech nothing, for I no verbs."
As if plain words, useful and intelligible instructions, were not as good for an esquire, or one that is in commission from the King, as for him that holds the plough.
John Eachard, 1670. Some Observations Upon
the Answer to an Enquiry into
the Grounds and Occasions
of the Contempt of the Clergy.
