1. “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
2. “- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
– Never use a long word where a short one will do.
– If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
– Never use the passive where you can use the active.
– Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
– Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
3. “When I sit down to
write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of
art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some
fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get
a hearing.”
4. “For after all, what
is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education,
money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind,
money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me
not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.”
5. “In an age like our
own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be
allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman
is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to
commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist,
however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if
it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in
railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the
ground that he might write another King Lear. And, after all, the worst
crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic
reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking
pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one’s head
simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a
disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense,
affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it
shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of
what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best
wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a
concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, “This
is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the
public hangman.” Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one
is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a
citizen and a human being.”
6. “I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”
7. “In certain kinds of
writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is
normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking
in meaning.”
8. “Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.”
9. “I do not think one
can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early
development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives
in … but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an
emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.”
10. “Political language
is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to
give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
11. “He was conscious
of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching
of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight
booziness caused by the gin.”
12. “Political writing
in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted
together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable
result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has
to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be
politically orthodox.”
13. “Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”
14. “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.”
15. “To write or even
speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.
Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even
for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity,
against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment
of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and
dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
16. “When I talk to
anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel
that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared
from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is
simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s
point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any
sufferings except those of himself and his friends.”
17. “The actual writing
would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the
interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head,
literally for years.”
18. “A scrupulous
writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four
questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express
it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh
enough to have an effect?”
19. “Aesthetic
enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other
hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of
one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a
good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable
and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot
of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet
words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or
he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the
level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic
considerations.”
20. “Writing a book is a
horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful
illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven
on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
