Quotations from all quarters on life, literature, and whatever else tickled my fancy. Browse and enjoy. —T. S.

Jonathan Richardson on Milton

A reader of Milton must be always upon duty; he is surrounded with sense, it arises in every line, every word is to the purpose; there are no lazy intervals, all has been considered, and demands and merits observation. Even in the best writers you sometimes find words and sentences which hang on so loosely you may blow ’em off; Milton’s are all substance and weight; fewer would not have serv’d the turn, and more would have been superfluous.

—Jonathan Richardson

This is, to my mind, very nearly the highest praise of a writer’s style that anyone could make. The only other thing that might be added is if the writing also sounds well, and the sounds and rhythms comport with the meaning, so that the suggestive and poetical qualities of the language reinforce the plain meaning of the words. This quality also (I would add on my own account) Milton has in abundance.

Dr. Johnson, in choosing literary sources for his Dictionary, tried to include just those authors whose use of language was unimpeachable by the standards of the time, and recent enough still to be a fairly faithful representation of living speech. The better the writer, the more he could be excused for not being recent, and contrariwise. The oldest author that Johnson included in his list of authorities was Milton; and granting that remark of Richardson’s, and my own addendum to it, I think he was eminently right to include him.

G. K. C. on appreciation

The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said, ‘Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,’ put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth ‘Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.’ The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.

—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

Thomas Sowell on honesty

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

—Thomas Sowell

‘A Confession’, by C. S. Lewis

I have sometimes been asked why I write old-fashioned epic fantasy instead of something Edgy and Hip and Relevant and Commercial. I have also sometimes been asked (not always by the same people) why I write trivial and childish epic fantasy instead of something Deep and Meaningful and Artistic and Literary. To both those questions I have to give the same answer, which is a poem by the inimitable C. S. Lewis:

A Confession

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;
Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.
I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things . . . peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.

Kipling on editing

This leads me to the Higher Editing. Take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the inter-spaces of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and ‘when thou hast done, repent not.’ The shorter the tale, the longer the brushwork and, normally, the shorter the lie-by, and vice versa. The longer the tale, the less brush but the longer lie-by. I have had tales by me for three or five years which shortened themselves almost yearly. The magic lies in the Brush and the Ink. For the Pen, when it is writing, can only scratch; and bottled ink is not to compare with the ground Chinese stick. Experto crede.

—Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself

I have read a lot of advice to writers in my time, some of which is pretty widely applicable, some narrowly applicable, some scarcely applicable at all, and some of which I would urge anyone to erase from their brains if they value their sanity. This advice of Kipling’s is one of the few things I can recommend to anyone. Except for one caveat: The ground Chinese stick is not recommended if you write on any kind of electronic device. Real proper India ink is so difficult to wipe off the screen.

G. K. C. on freethinking

But in truth this notion that it is ‘free’ to deny miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them. It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism. The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it.

—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

G. K. C. on the laws of Elfland

The more I think about this passage, the more I am convinced that it expresses a fundamental and necessary principle of Fantasy; indeed, it may contain the key to the whole art: [Read more…]

Robert E. Howard on realism

Nobody writes realistic realism, and if they did, no one would read it. The writers that think they write it just give their own ideas about things they think they see. The sort of man who could write realism is the fellow who never reads or writes anything.

— Robert E. Howard

Scott Meyer: ‘How to Resurrect a Dead Character’

No sooner had I posted my link to Scott Meyer’s ‘How to Kill Off a Fictional Character’ than Meyer came up with the inevitable sequel:

Rodney lives!

Scott Meyer: ‘How to Kill Off a Fictional Character’

From the wise and frequently inimitable Scott Meyer of Basic Instructions:

Go thou, and do likewise.