Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds.
It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
L’artGreen arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.
And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.
Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
Listen to me, attend me!And I will breathe into thee a soul,And thou shalt live for ever.
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, “Mamma, can I open the light?” She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
Great Literature is simply language charged to the utmost with meaning
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.And give up verse, my boy,There’s nothing in it.Likewise a friend of Bloughram’s once advised me:Don’t kick against the pricks,Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your gameAnd died, there’s nothing in it.
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Properly we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess.
Utter originality is of course out of the question.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
Good art however ‘immoral’ is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.