Wit – Youth
WIT
There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply callisthenics with words. [Dorothy Parker]
Wit is cultured insolence. [Aristotle]
A witty saying proves nothing. [Voltaire]
To me there is no more odious kind of person than those who on every occasion believe they are obliged to be ex officio witty. [Georg Lichtenberg]
The great art of regarding small deviations from the truth as being the truth itself is at the same time the foundation of wit, where the whole thing would collapse if we were to regard these deviations in a spirit of philosophical rigour. [Georg Lichtenberg]
[Brummell] has arrived at the very minimum of wit, and reduced it, ‘by happiness or pains,’ to an almost invisible point. All his bon-mots turn upon a single circumstance, the exaggeration of the merest trifles into matters of importance, or treating everything else with the utmost nonchalance and indifference, as if whatever pretended to pass beyond those limits was a bore, and disturbed the serene air of high life. [William Hazlitt]
That capacity for the cool adjustment of two dissimilar things which makes a spark, and is called wit. [Lord Esher, speaking of Lord Roseberry]
WOMEN
Women weren’t put on this earth just to turn men on. [JoAnne Schmitz]
Without women, the beginning of our life would be helpless; the middle devoid of pleasure; and the end, of consolation. [Victor Joseph Etienne de Jouy]
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots. [Rebecca West]
When a woman isn’t beautiful, people always say, ‘You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.’ [Anton Chekhov]
A woman can look both moral and exciting… if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle. [Edna Ferber]
There is a surrealist glow in the eyes of all women. [Louis Aragon]
Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealing with men. [Joseph Conrad]
Imagine a stylish young woman, put her into a Laura Ashley dress or give her the means to dress more expensively; give her also the project of writing the modern equivalent of La Connaissance approchée; for example, a work devoted to the epistemology of superconductivity. In a flowery dress. Is there a discrepancy or not? That is the question. [Michele le Doeuff]
I’m a woman, why aren’t you? [French feminist slogan]
I have always cherished the spectacle of a woman at her toilet in all its infinite detail. At one time, in a big cafe that I used to frequent daily, the pretext of the vague medical studies which I had, at that tender age, drifted into, plus some useful connections, had won for me the privilege of tarrying in the ladies’ washroom, and I loved to stay there, idly flattering those who came in and those who left, witnessing those adorable transformation scenes by women whose nature had just disarranged them slightly and who were using their arts to restore their powers of seduction. The infinite variations in their demeanour, their quite astonishing ways of behaving, their modesty and their immodesty, even the vulgarities which they deemed permissible under the circumstances, occasionally their dignity, their stateliness even: I never got tired of lingering in this place of transition where the spirit of lewdness came to relax. A curious ardour used to emerge from the diversity of attitudes. Often, women travelling on this runaway train suddenly took a liking to each other, a liking which brought hands or lips together. The gesture of the mouth stretching itself for the lipstick, cloud of powder, and you, artificial lilies, blooming for me under my very eyes. [Louis Aragon]
One is not born, but rather, becomes, a woman. [Simone de Beauvoir]
There never was a man who was not gratified by being told that he was liked by the women. [Samuel Johnson]
You can draw any character as near to life as you want, and no offence will be taken provided you say that he is attractive to women. [Evelyn Waugh when asked whether Peter Rodd ever resented Waugh's portrayal of him as Basil Seal]
So it is not sex but the capacity for fertility that makes up the real difference between male and female, and male domination, which we must now attempt to comprehend, is ultimately the control, the appropriation of a woman’s fertility when she is fertile. What remains – that is, the psychological factors, the special aptitudes that make up a society’s images of masculinity and femininity and are assumed to justify the domination of one sex by another – is a product of education, and thus of ideology. Therefore, there is no maternal instinct (in the commonly understood sense) that would have maternity be a purely biological matter and would maintain that woman, determined by her nature and thereby self-evidently, has an avocation for child care and, what is more, for the domestic. Maternity is a social fact just as it is a fact of biology (the same holds true for paternity), and there is nothing about the biological fact itself that explains the ineluctable process which, by way of the maternal instinct, assigns woman domestic tasks and a subordinate status.
The bodily appropriation of fertility in the male is doomed to failure: it can never be more than simulated (this does happen). So appropriation takes the form of control: appropriation of women themselves, or the products of their fertility; distribution of women among the men. Women are fertile, inventive, create life; but man brings order, regimentation, political order. His control is made all the easier by the handicap that comes with fertility: a pregnant or nursing woman is less mobile than a man. Thus, it has been shown that, among the Bushmen, nomadic hunter-gatherers who have no domestic animals for milking and among whom, therefore, the child may nurse to the age of three or more, a man covers 5,000 to 6,000 kilometres a year, a woman 2,500 to 3,000.
This restricted mobility does not in and of itself imply an inferior physical capacity (nor, a fortiori, inferior intellectual capacities); however, it has been used to justify a certain distribution of tasks in prehistoric societies of wild men, hunter-gatherers, who lived completely from their natural surroundings (we know that agriculture and husbandry are relatively recent inventions in the history of humanity). Men hunt large animals and protect the unarmed from predators of every kind; women care for the unweaned young and gather foodstuffs easier to obtain than large game (one cannot hunt easily with a baby on one’s hip). This is a division of labour born of objective constraints and not of a psychological predisposition in either sex to the chores assigned them, or of a physical constraint imposed by one sex on the other – this division of labour does not carry any inherent principle of valorization.
The social control of women’s fertility and the division of labour between the sexes are, in all probability, the two axes of sexual inequality. But one must still grasp the mechanism that makes this inequality into a valorized relation of domination/submission.
Kinship is the general matrix of social relations. Man is a being who lives in society; all society is divided into groups based on kinship, and it overcomes this initial division through cooperation. The primary institution leading to solidarity among groups is marriage. A group that counted only on its own internal resources to reproduce itself biologically, that practised incest and incest alone, would vanish if only through a reduction in numbers: a brother and sister conjoined produces one household instead of two. The exchange of women between groups is an exchange of life, since women give children and their fertility to people other than their immediate kin. This is no doubt the crucial element in male domination, embodied in the economic constraints of the distribution of chores: the reciprocal refusal by men to profit from the fertility of their daughters and sisters, of the women in their group, for the profit of foreign groups. The rule of exogamy basic to every society must be understood as the rule of the exchange by men of women and their fertility. What is remarkable is that, through special rules of filiation and alliance, they always initially appropriate the women in their group as well as the women given in exchange for their own. It is only here that violence and force can be invoked as a final explanation.
The appropriation of women’s fertility, which is vital for the constitution and survival of any society through the exchange of women, goes hand in hand with the confinement of women in a maternal role. One has the image of the Mother and of the nursing mother. This is made all the more easy because the child is kept on the breast for many months. Weaning, in societies unfamiliar with artificial nursing and modern nutritional technique for babies, occurs at two and one-half or even three years. The child knows only its mother as a food source during these years and will continue to turn to her for food after weaning; and it will do so all the more ‘naturally’ because a restriction to the nursing role, to the role of keeper and caregiver, will have occurred. The mother may be placed on a pedestal, greatly respected, idealized – this still does not contradict the idea of male power itself.
The appropriation and control of women’s fertility, a restriction of women to the nursing role that is facilitated by the child’s dependence on her for food – this seizing of sorts has been accompanied by the invention of specialized technical skills, that is to say, by the male sex’s exclusive use of certain techniques which require an apprenticeship but from which the female’s physical make-up does not in any way exclude her. Men have created a preserve, just as there was a private, inaccessible reserve for women, that of biological reproduction. Thus, to take another example from the hunter-gatherers, from the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, bow-hunting is the men’s responsibility. They learn how to make bow, arrows and in some cases poison. They learn at a very early age how to use a bow, and this apprenticeship is reserved for them. Chapman shows that, without a fitting apprenticeship, women are physically unable to use this object. The preserve of technical skill of a highly specialized nature, a corollary of the distribution by sex of primary tasks and one based on objective constraints, results in another restriction of women to tasks that certainly require knowledge and skill (but are not sex-specific: men can also gather in times of scarcity) but that will never be a part of the male preserve. What matter here is not that few women manage, from time to time, to enter into this preserve; it is the very justification for the existence of a preserve that is being called into question.
We may add to that the work of the mind, the ideological creativity we saw at wok in the symbol systems set forth above: an unequal value is assigned to the tasks performed, having nothing to do with the amount of work performed or the mastery of its execution. Thus, in hunter-gatherer societies, the women’s contribution by gathering can occasionally amount to more than seventy percent of the food supplies of the group. But that does not matter: the real prestige accrues to the role of hunter. Here we face the ultimate mystery. Because, it seems to me, the raw material of the symbolic is the body – the prime place for the observation of sensory data – and because for any complex problem there can only be solutions that refer to explanations based on simpler and simpler data until they run up against elementary facts, I would propose that the reason for this is possibly a feature anchored in the female body (and not an incapacity for the concoction of sperm). What man values in man, then, is no doubt his ability to bleed, to risk his life, to take that of others, by his own free will; the woman ‘sees’ her blood flowing from her body (Do we not, in French, usually say ‘voir’, to see, for ‘avoir ses règles’, to have one’s period?) and she produces life without necessarily wanting to do so or being able to prevent it. In her body she periodically experiences, for a time that has a beginning and an end, changes of which she is not the mistress, and which she cannot prevent. It is in this relation to blood that we may perhaps find the fundamental impetus for all the symbolic elaboration, at the outset, on the relations between the sexes. [Françoise Héritier-Augé]
I have been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. [Nadia Boulanger, responding to some male chauvinism regarding her ability to conduct an orchestra]
Freud’s basic premise grew out of the idea that the undifferentiated human embryo is innately bisexual, and that after differentiation occurs, male and female structures evolve unequally, with one or the other dominating. Hence, he concluded, everyone remains bisexual to some degree. It was his understanding that the penis and the clitoris evolved from the same embryonic structure, but that the clitoris was more rudimentary. This led him to the interesting conclusion that women are sexually incomplete in comparison with men…
According to recent discoveries in the field of embryology, we do not begin life as bisexuals. The early embryo is not bisexual, as formerly thought; it is not undifferentiated, ‘it’ is female. While genetic sex is established at conception, all human embryos develop as females until the fifth or sixth week of fetal life. At this time the sex genes begin to exert their influence. If the genetic sex is male, the primordial germ cells migrate to the future testes where they stimulate the reproduction of a substance that, in turn, induces the development of fetal androgen, the male sex hormone. This androgen suppresses the growth of the female reproductive system and induces development along male lines. By the twelfth week the male reproductive system is firmly established and reversals of these tissues can no longer occur – although suppression of their growth and function can take place later in life. If the genetic sex is female, it is all different. The germ cells arrive at the ovaries but no inductor substance is needed to stimulate the production of oestregen. The female simply develops along the lines of her innate genetically determined female structure, while the male differentiation must be acquired. Although biologists are aware that we were all female in the beginning, it will probably be a long time before the influence of these discoveries filters down to the level where theologians will be ready to produce an ‘Adam-out-of-Eve’ version of Genesis. [June Singer]
WORDS
Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken. [Attributed to Khakheperressenb, an ancient Egyptian scribe]
Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it. [André Breton]
Syntax confers power on its masters. The aspirant working classes usually make the mistake of thinking it’s vocabulary that accomplishes this, and are often – sinisterly – encouraged in this belief. [Don Paterson]
Worn, threadbare, filed down, words have become the carcass of words, phantom words; everyone drearily chews and regurgitates the sound of them between their jaws. [Adamov]
The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. [Francis Bacon]
WORK
Hard work never killed anybody, but why take the chance? [Edgar Bergen]
A boy was asked whether he ever felt like doing any work; he answered ‘yes, but I do without.’ [?]
Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing. [Robert Benchley]
I am obliged to accept the idea of work as a material necessity… If the sinister obligations of life impose it on me, be it so, but to ask me to believe in it, to revere mine or someone else’s never… It is not worth living if one has to work. [André Breton]
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. [Bertrand Russell]
I never work. Work does age you so. [Quentin Crisp]
I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. [Jerome K Jerome]
The slave is he to whom no good is proposed as the object of his labour except mere existence. [Simone Weil]
Cheerfulness is the daughter of employment: I have known a man return in high spirits from a funeral merely because he had had the management of it. [Bishop Horne]
To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character. [Fyodor Dostoyevsky]
… some certain People of the East Indies, who think that Apes and Baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not for fear they should be imployed, and set to work. [Antoine Le Grand]
What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilisation reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. [Raoul Vaneigem]
Going to work is a misery and a tragedy for the great multitude of boys and girls who have to face it. Suddenly they see their lives plainly defined as limited and inferior. It is a humiliation so great that they cannot even express the hidden bitterness of their souls. But it is there. It betrays itself in derision. I do not believe that it would be possible for contemporary economic life to go on if it were not for the consolations of derision. [H.G. Wells]
[Max Ernst studiously avoided] all forms of study which might degenerate into gainful employment.
To labour is to place one’s own being, body and soul, in the circuit of inert matter, turn it into an intermediary between one state and another of a fragment of matter, make of it an instrument. The labourer turns his body and soul into an appendix of the tool which he handles. The movements of the body and the concentration of the mind are a function of the requirements of the tool, which itself is adapted to the matter being worked upon. [Simone Weil]
Labour (in the form of leisure as well) invades all of life as a fundamental oppression, as a type of control, and as a permanent occupation in pre-determined places and times, according to an omnipresent code. People must be kept occupied in all situations: at school, in the factory, on the beach, in front of the TV, or in job retraining. It is a permanent general mobilisation. But this form of labour is no longer productive in the original sense: it is no more than the mirror of society, its imaginary, its fantastic reality principle. Its death drive perhaps.
This is the tendency of every present strategy concerning labour: ‘job enrichment,’ flexible hours, mobility, retraining, continual education, autonomy, worker-management, and the decentralisation of the labour process, including the Californian utopia of computerised work in the home. You are no longer brutally snatched away from your daily life to be surrendered to machines; you are integrated in the system, along with your childhood, your habits, your human relations, your unconscious drives, even your rejection of work. A position will be found for you somewhere, a personalised job, and if not, you will receive an amount of unemployment benefits adjusted to your personal equation. In any case, you will never be abandoned. The important thing is that everyone be a terminal in the network, a lowly terminal, but a term nevertheless – above all, not an inarticulate cry, but a linguistic term, at the terminus of the whole structural network of language. The very choice of employment, the utopia of a job custom-made for everyone means that the die is cast, and that the system of job placement is complete. Labour power is no longer brutally bought and sold: it is ‘designed,’ ‘marketed’ and ‘merchandised,’ linking production with the consumerist system of signs…
This is where we are now… the reduction of all labour to a service, labour as pure and simple presence/occupation, as the consumption of time, the prestation of time. One performs an ‘act’ of labour, like one registers attendance or swears an act of allegiance. This is indeed the sense in which prestation is inseparable from the prestator. A service rendered is the commitment of one’s body, time, space, and grey matter. Whether it is productive or not makes no difference with regard to this personal indexation…
In this sense, labour can no longer be distinguished from other practices, and particularly from its opposite term, free time – which, because it implies the same mobilisation and investment as labour (or the same productive disinvestment), has for this reason become today a service rendered, and so by rights should merit a wage (which is not in fact impossible). In brief, this not only destroys the imaginary distinction between productive and unproductive labour, but also the very distinction between labour and everything else…
Work appears everywhere, because there is no linger any labour. It is at this moment that labour attains its definitive and perfected form, its principle, linking up with the principles elaborated throughout history in those other social spaces which preceded manufacture and served as its model: the asylum, the ghetto, the workhouse, and the prison – all those places of confinement and concentration created by our culture in its march toward civilisation. But even these places have lost their fixed boundaries today: they diffuse across the global society, because the asylum form and the carceral form of discrimination now invests all of social space and all moments of real life. Enough factories, asylums, prisons and schools still remain, and doubtless will always remain, to act as signs of deterrence and to deflect, by their imaginary substance, the reality of capital’s domination. [Jean Baudrillard]
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play. [Arnold J. Toynbee]
Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary but does not enrich or ennoble a human life. [Aristotle]
… ethnographers show us that work was invented by women; work, that is, as the compulsory everyday chore, in contrast to enterprise, and such spontaneous activity as sports and adventure. For this reason it is the woman who creates trades: she is the first agriculturalist, collector and ceramicist. [Ortega y Gasset]
It is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else. [James M. Barrie]
If work if so terrific, why do they have to pay you to do it? [George Carlin]
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. [Bertrand Russell]
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. [Oscar Wilde]
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. [Henry David Thoreau]
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him. [Georg Lichtenberg]
WRITING
It’s not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one’s thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone with them. [Isabel Colegate]
A piece of work that has taken a man three years of gropings, prunings, amendments, excisions, sortileges, is read and appraised in thirty minutes by another man. And this reader forms a mental picture of the author as a man who was capable of writing it all straight off, spontaneously – an infinitely ‘unlikely’ sort of author. [Paul Valéry]
In the writer all simple emotion has ceased to exist. Everything he sees, his joys, his pleasures, his suffering, his despair, instantly become subjects for observation. Hearts, faces, gestures, intonations are all analysed, endlessly and despite everything. As soon as he has seen whatever he has seen, he must know the why and wherefore of it. Not a single impulse, or cry, or kiss of his is ever unequivocal… An actor and spectator of himself and others, he is never just an actor, as those good and simple folk are who live life unaware. Everything around him is transparent glass, hearts, actions, concealed intentions, and he suffers from a strange affliction, a sort of dual personality, that makes him into a terrifyingly contrived and complicated creature in a state of constant vibration. [Maupassant]
Another damned fat book, eh, Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon? [Duke of Gloucester]
Learn as much by writing as by reading. [Lord Acton]
It’s the writing that teaches you. [Isaac Asimov]
Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer about the progress of his disease. [Jay McInerney]
If you wish to be a writer, write. [Epictetus]
I do think… the might stir made about scribbling and scribes, by themselves and others – a sign of effeminacy, and degeneracy, and weakness. Who would write, who had anything better to do? [Lord Byron]
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations. [Charles de Montesquieu]
The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first. [Blaise Pascal]
An insane pride is necessary to write. [Jean-Paul Sartre]
After the funeral, my father struggled through half a page, and it might as well have been Hottentot.
‘And what dun they gie thee for that, lad?’
‘Fifty pounds, father.’
‘Fifty pounds!’ He was dumbfounded, and looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. ‘Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.’ [D.H. Lawrence]
Writing is an excellent means of awakening in every man the system slumbering within him; and everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before. [Georg Lichtenberg]
You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length. [Karl Friedrich Gauss]
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. [Walter Benjamin]
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. [Walter Benjamin]
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author. [Jean de la Bruyere]
I owe Les Enfants Terribles to Jacques Chardonne. He scolded me: ‘You have masterpiece cramp. White paper paralyses you. Begin with anything. Write: “One winter evening…” and go on.’ [Jean Cocteau]
The writer who labours on a book for four years becomes that book and assimilates all its alien elements, which add up to a structure far more more impressive, vast, complex, and learned than their author… The work is all-consuming, a pious labour, a parasite. And when it has fed on me and sucked my blood, when it begins to make its own way in the world, I lie wan, drained, disgusted and exhausted, and obsessed with thoughts of death. [Michel Tournier]
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other – fatal – moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feedback loop with the machine. [Jean Baudrillard]
Writing is a form of therapy; I sometimes wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation. [Graham Greene]
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modelled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. [Antonin Artaud]
In our age, if a young person is untalented, the odds are in favour of his imagining he wants to write. [W.H. Auden]
Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said. [Jean Rostand]
I always write a thing first and think about it afterwards, because the easiest way to have consecutive thoughts is to start putting them down. [E.B. White]
A writer develops the muscles of his mind. This training leaves hardly any leisure for sport. It demands suffering, falls, laziness, weakness, setbacks, exhaustion, mourning, insomnia, exercises which are the reverse of those develop the body. [Jean Cocteau]
When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he’s gone through, it means he was born for literature. [Edouard Bourdet]
If only poets and novelists could be translated into musicanhood, even for a few seconds; then we’d see the vast majority, after only a few notes, revealed as a bunch of desperate scrapers and parpers without a tune in their heads or the rudiments of technique. God, the time we would save… [Don Paterson]
… what Turgenev had in mind when he once ironically referred to the shortcomings inevitable in a great writer: by which, obviously, he meant the lack of certain restraints, the absence of a customary reserve, discretion, decency, shame, or, on the positive side, the domination of a definite claim on the love of the world. [Thomas Mann]
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. [Georges Simenon]
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. [Samuel Johnson]
A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it. [Samuel Johnson]
The two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. [Samuel Johnson]
I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter. [Pascal]
No work, and especially no work of literature, should display the effort it has cost. A writer who wants to be read by posterity must not neglect to drop into odd corners of his chapters such hints at whole books, ideas for disputations, that his readers will believe he has thousands of them to throw away. [Georg Lichtenberg]
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. [Flannery O'Connor]
When too many books are written on a subject, one of two suspicions arises: either the subject is understood and the book is easy to write – as is the case with books on real variables, convexity, projective geometry in the plane, or compact orientable surfaces. Or the subject is important, but nobody understands what is going on; such is the case with quantum field theory, the distribution of primes, pattern recognition, and cluster analysis. [Gian-Carlo Rota]
Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading. [Horace]
To write well, lastingly well, immortally well, must one not leave Father and Mother and cleave unto the Muse?… ‘Tis a task as scarce leaves a man time to be a good neighbour, an useful friend, nay to plant a tree, much less to save a soul. [Alexander Pope]
The listing of projects, including phantom works almost ‘ready for the press,’ was to become stronger as a habit in the years ahead and, as with most habits that become controlling, there was more than one motivation. In part, of course, he was assuring others: he was promising, as he had always promised, to do what they expected – or rather what he thought they expected, since the rest of the world is far less tortured by our inadequacies than we imagine. He was also, more importantly, setting a mark for himself, a challenge. If he said a thing was ‘about to go to the press,’ then surely he would now have to live up to what he said unless he was to make himself completely ridiculous. And more often than not he had really thought about the subject, had talked about it brilliantly. All that was needed was to face that small, foolishly intimidating object, the sheet of paper waiting to be filled. The trouble with the empty sheet of paper, as contrasted with mere conversation, is that the immediate audience present in conversation now exists only as an abstraction. Into that large blank all the self-censors, the fears of criticism, the inhibitions, begin to move and tower above one. Even the fluent speaker then finds himself weighing every word; invention is paralysed; one word at a time is jotted down, crossed out, replaced. Of course he could write fluently at times, and had done so. But it was one thing to turn out sentimental or routine verse for the magazines back in his early twenties, and another now that he was trying to work at a higher, more demanding level. So much must be known, subsumed, and reconciled to other considerations. And here was, stranded in the North. [Walter Jackson Bate]
Rogers was aghast at the rapidity with which the Scotts, Byrons, and Moores poured out their works; and even Campbell was too quick for him – he, with all his leisure, and being always at it, producing to the amount of two octavo volumes in his whole life. The charge of haste and incompleteness alleged against his Columbus in the Edinburgh Review, forty years since, was very exasperating to him; and so absurd that one cannot help but suspect Sydney Smith of being the author of it, for the sake of contrast with his conversational description of Rogers’s method of composition. Somebody asked one day whether Rogers had written anything lately. ‘Only a couplet,’ was the reply – (the couplet being his celebrated epigram on Lord Dudley). ‘Only a couplet!’ exclaimed Sydney Smith. ‘Why, what would you have? When Rogers produces a couplet, he goes to bed, and the knocker is tied – and straw is laid down – and caudle is made – and the answer to inquiries is that Mr. Rogers is as well as can be expected.’ [Harriet Martineau]
What a mad strange mad occupation, to spend one’s life wearing oneself out over words, and sweating all day to round off periods. There are times, it is true, when one experiences great joy; but at the price of how much discouragement and bitterness, does one but that pleasure! Today, for instance, I spent eight hours correcting five pages, and I think I’ve worked well! Imagine the rest! It is pitiable! Whatever happens, I’ll complete this work, which by its very object, is a stiff exercise. [Gustave Flaubert]
It is truly odious to subordinate the whole of one’s life to the confection of a book. [Marcel Proust]
The book we begin tomorrow must be as if there had been none before; new and outrageous as the morning sun. [George Steiner]
The old-fashioned boltholes of writers who do not wish to undertake the responsibility of creating a work of art are no longer so easy of access. Drink is available and there are still artists who drink to excess out of the consciousness of wasted ability, for drunkenness is a substitute for art; it is in itself a low form of creation. But it is not drink which is the temptation, since that is but a symptom of the desire for self-forgetfulness…
The harmless activities of day-dreaming and conversation are more insidious. Day-dreaming bears a specious resemblance to the workings of the creative imagination. It is in fact a substitute for it and one in which all difficulties are shelved, all problems ignored, a short cut ending in a blank wall. This is even more true of conversation; a good talker can talk away the substance of twenty books in as many evenings. He will describe the central idea of the book he means to write until it revolts him.
As journalism brings in quicker returns than literature so the profits of conversation are more immediate than those of journalism. By the silence which he commands, the luxury of his décor, and the glow from the selected company who have been asked to meet him, a good talker is paid almost before he opens his mouth. The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.
Than good conversation nothing is sooner forgotten and those who remember it do so unconsciously and reproduce it as their own. Coleridge, Swinburne, Wilde, Harry Melville, Vernon Lee – not much survives now of the conversation of these mighty-mouthed international geysers. They were at the mercy of a few indolent, forgetful, and envious listeners…
Sometimes when in flight from the demands of talent, from the bite of the gadfly, writers will seek refuge in gentility, in ancestor-worship, or by becoming members of an unliterary sporting class. They will breed bulldogs, hunt, shoot, attend race-meetings, and try to lose contact with all other writers except those whose guilt is of equal standing. This instinct to hide themselves in a world where books are unheard of in no way resembles the artist’s desire for ‘luxe, calme, et volupté,’ for a lavish, ostentatious life, but is a particularly English affliction, and it is no exaggeration to say that nearly every English author since Byron and Shelley has been hamstrung by respectability, and been prevented by snobbery and moral cowardice from attaining his full dimensions. It is this blight of insular gentility which accounts for the difference between Dickens, Thackery, Arnold, Tennyson, Pater and Tolstoy, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Gide; it is the distinction between a good fellow or growing up…
Sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict, especially that laziness which renders them incapable of doing the thing which they are most looking forward to. The conflict may or may not end in disaster, but their silence is better than the overproduction which must so end and slothful writers such as Johnson, Coleridge, Greville, in spite of the nodding poppies of conversation, morphia, and horse-racing, have more to their credit than Macaulay, Trollope, or Scott. To accuse writers of being idle is a mark of envy or stupidity – La Fontaine slept continually and scarcely opened his mouth; Baudelaire, according to Dr. Laforgue, feared to perfect his work because he feared the incest with his mother which was his perfect fulfilment. Perfectionists are notoriously lazy and true artistic indolence is deeply neurotic; a pain not a pleasure…
The most real thing for a writer is the life of the spirit, the growth or curve of vision within him of which he is the custodian, selecting the experiences propitious to its development, protecting it from those unfavourable. When he fails to do this something seems to rot; he becomes angry, frightened, and unhappy, suffering from what Swift called ‘that desiderium which of all things makes life most uneasy.’ [Cyril Connolly]
The best writing is rewriting. [E. B. White]
All of our experiences with writing tell us that it is only after we have finished a text that we really know what it should have been. [Michel Butor]
… prolixity of phrases has it own obscurity, no less than terse brevity. The latter evades the mind’s eye while the former distracts it; the one lacks the light while the other overwhelms with superfluous glitter; the latter does not arouse the sight while the former quite dazzles it. [Johannes Kepler]
One does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something. [E.M. Cioran]
YOUTH
But, really, everything interested me. When you are young you are like a billiard ball. You go in every direction, according to the latest shock you have received. [Max Ernst]
In his youth, everybody believes that the world began to exist only when he was born, and that everything really exists only for his sake. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]
I have always defended the skies of my youth. [Louis Aragon]
Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere. [V.S. Pritchett]
In retrospect Nietzsche thought of his ten months at Bonn as time wasted. What they in fact represent is the period in his life in which he tried to live like any other young man and found he couldn’t do it. The desire to be ‘different’ is common – and superficial; the man who actually is different very often doesn’t want to be, because he has a premonition how much unhappiness his singularity is going to cost him. In the long run he cannot help himself; he must face the isolation and disappointment which life has in store for him as best he can; but at first he may resist his fate, or seek to deny it altogether, by involving himself with spurious enthusiasm in the pursuits which those around him appear to find normal. [R.J. Hollingdale]
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. [George Bernard Shaw]
Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life. [Herbert Asquith]
It is always necessary to repudiate for a time, at the age of twenty, those whom you have idolized, for fear of being overgrown with ivy. [Francis Poulenc]
To feel oneself an exceptional being; I sobbed with fright when I first made that discovery, but I had to resign myself to it, and already I had sufficiently accepted the exceptional not to be very much surprised when I had to become aware of it likewise in sexual matters…
The feeling of the exceptional I experienced, still quite young, upon noting that often I did not react as others did, as the common run of others. And try as one might later on to humiliate oneself, to deprecate oneself, to want to be vulgar, to refuse oneself to every distinction, to try to melt into the mass and like it, one remains nonetheless a creature apart. That feeling of differentiation the child may feel while still very young and by turns with sorrow, even with anguish, and very rarely with joy. [André Gide]
One of the most widespread problems of puberty is the adolescent’s discovery of his own body as strange and estranged, a discovery felt as a mutilation, a reason to despair.
It’s the age of ‘bad habits’ (drugs, masturbation, alcohol), which are merely efforts at reconciliation with yourself, attenuated adaptations of the vanished epileptic process. This is also the age, nowadays, of the intemperate utilisation of technical prostheses of mediatisation (radio, motorcycle, photo, hi-fi, etc). [Paul Virilio]
The young were living mostly in exile, but exile gave them possibilities of which they had seldom dreamed before. Everything around them became slightly abnormal, the new occupation, the environment, the dress they wore, the physical and emotional climate. The concrete things of the past, like postal addresses, timetables, road signs, became less probable and friendships became all-important because it was unlikely that they could last. Nearly all of them, willingly or unwillingly, became creatures of the moment, living in an everlasting present; the past had vanished, the future was uncertain. [Rodney Garland]
Far beyond the city are the wild places. The cultivated land is the space of adults, citizens, their work, their battles and the wars in which they engage to defend it… In contrast the ‘eschatia,’ the marginal zone and the zone of passage from the cultured area to the totally uncultivated, symbolises and also is another kind of transition, that from childhood and adolescence to the adult stage, the transition from the wild and ‘thorny’ to cultivated life and ‘ground corn.’ [Peter Ellinger]
Youth is one long intoxication: it is reason in a fever. [La Rochefoucauld]
After the death of my grandfather, when I was ferreting about in his tempting room, a kind of scientific-artistic junk-shop, I found a full box of Nazir cigarettes and a cigarette holder in cherrywood. I pocketed the treasure.
In spring, I can see myself one morning at Maisons-Lafitte amid the tall grasses and the wild pinks, opening the box and smoking one of the cigarettes. The sensation of liberty, luxury and future was so strong that never again, whatever happens, shall I find anything akin to it. I could be proclaimed king, I could be guillotined, but the surprise and strangeness could not be more intense than that forbidden entry into the universe of grown-ups, universe of mourning and bitterness. [Jean Cocteau]
How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception. [Alfred de Musset]
She wraps herself in a grim solitude; she will not expose to those about her the hidden ego that she regards as her true self and that is in fact an imaginary personage: she must play at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint as did Marie Lenéru, or merely that unmatched marvel who is herself. There is always an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective person with whom her relatives and friends are familiar. She is also convinced that she is not understood; her relations with herself are then only the more impassioned: she is intoxicated with her isolation, she feels herself different, superior, exceptional; she promises herself that the future will be a revenge upon the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and paltry existence she makes her escape in dreams. [Simone de Beauvoir]
All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation always takes place in adolescence. Self-discovery is above all the realisation that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable transparent wall – that of our consciousness – between the world and ourselves. It is true that we sense our aloneness almost as soon as we are born, but children and adults can transcend their solitude and forget themselves in games or work. The adolescent, however, vacillates between infancy and youth, halting for a moment before the infinite richness of the world. He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question…
The adolescent is also ignorant of the future changes that will affect the countenance he sees in the water. The mask of an old man is as indecipherable at first glance as a sacred stone covered with occult symbols: it is the history of various amorphous features that only take shape, slowly and vaguely, after the profoundest contemplation. Eventually these features are seen as a face, and later as a mask, a meaning, a history…
Adolescence is a break with the world of childhood and a pause on the threshold of the adult world. Spranger points out that solitude is a distinctive characteristic of adolescence. Narcissus, the solitary, is the very image of the adolescent. It is during this period that we become aware of our singularity for the first time. But the dialectic of the emotions intervenes once more: since adolescence is extreme self-consciousness, it can only be transcended by self-forgetfulness, by self-surrender. Therefore solitude is not only a time of solitude but also of great romances, of heroism and sacrifice. The people have good reason to picture the hero and the lover as adolescents. The vision of the adolescent as a solitary figure, closed up within himself and consumed by desire or timidity, almost always resolves into a crowd of young people dancing, singing or marching as a group, or into a young couple strolling under the arched green branches in a park. The adolescent opens himself up to the world: to love, action, friendship, sports, heroic adventures. [Octavio Paz]
… this first-time intensity – epitomised by rock ‘n’ roll – is the hallmark of the teenage dream. [Jon Savage]
The young are an alien species. They won’t replace us by revolution. They will forget and ignore us out of existence. [William S. Burroughs]
I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own. [Margaret Atwood]
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. [Oscar Wilde]
… psychoanalysis, which once set out to break the power of the father image, firmly takes the side of the fathers, who either smile at the children’s highfalutin ideas with a droop at the corner of the mouth or else rely on life to teach them what’s what, and to consider it more important to earn money than get silly ideas into one’s head. The attitude of mind that distances itself from the realm of immediate ends and means, and is given the chance to do so during the brief years in which it is its own master before being absorbed and dulled by the necessity to earn a living, is slandered as mere narcissism. The powerlessness and fallibility of those who still believe in other possibilities is made out to be their own vain fault; what is blamed on their own inadequacies is much more the fault of a social order that constantly denies them the possible and breaks what potential people possess. [Theodor Adorno]
I have no contempt for that time of life when our friendships are most passionate and our passions are incorrigible and none of our sentiments yet compromised by greed or cowardice or disappointment. The volatility and intensity of adolescence are qualities we should aspire to preserve. [Edmund White]
… the height of elation or depth of despair, the quickly rising enthusiasms, the utter hopelessness, the burning… intellectual and philosophical preoccupations, the yearning for freedom, the sense of loneliness, the feeling of oppression by the parents, the impotent rages or active hates against the adult world, the erotic crushes… the suicidal fantasies. [Anna Freud on adolescence]
Nothing that I undertook, so I convinced myself, was the real, the actual thing, either in my work, which I looked upon as sketches leading to the real thing, or with women with whom I was friendly. In so doing I gave to my youth a sense of not yet being definitely burdened with responsibilities, and, at the same time, the diletto for unhampered tasting, testing, and enjoyment. Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind. [Stefan Zweig]
When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvellous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents’ limitations… At the same time, you feel sure that in all the wilderness of possibility; in all the forests of opinion, there is a vital something that can be known — known and grasped. That we will eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. So that then one’s true life — the point of everything — will emerge from the mist into a pure light, into total comprehension. But it isn’t like that at all. But if it isn’t, where did the idea come from, to torture and unsettle us? [Brian Aldiss]
