14 quotes
Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.
Commonplace Book (1985)
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
Commonplace Book (1985)
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
Commonplace Book (1985)
One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
Commonplace Book (1985)
N.B. this book and pensées not important and the temptation to mistake them for Creation must be resisted.
Commonplace Book (1985)
I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
Commonplace Book (1985)
It looks as if there is a physical as well as a moral break in the orders I send out. I have plenty of interesting thoughts but keep losing them like the post cards I have written, or like my cap.
Commonplace Book (1985)
Probable that I am now better than most people and as good as I ever shall be at this game, and can therefore get to know anyone I wish, provided I am not physically repellent. And perhaps this is why personal relationships no longer seem to me a serious branch of study.
Commonplace Book (1985)
No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.
Commonplace Book (1985)
But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
Commonplace Book (1985)
Peacefulness to be found in writing. Why do I not write every day? Partly because I feel I ought to write well and know I can't. But that is not a good enough reason for not writing, if it gains me poise & peace.
Commonplace Book (1985)
Today 29-9-34 in the garden, rockery side, looking up to the house where Bone was working, sky bluish, very gentle, I looked without theories or self consciousness. This happens very seldom, though I can prolong the delight if I prevent my engines from restarting.
Commonplace Book (1985)
[...] it is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.
Commonplace Book (1985)
I haven't made my point yet, which is that it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way — otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contrary the Christian danger.
Commonplace Book (1985)