Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Writing
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When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
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Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.
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What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.
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For Tommy, on that hot and empty afternoon, was in a state of mind in which grown-up people go away and write books about their whole world, and stories about what it is like to be married, and plays about the important problems of modern times. Tommy, being only ten years old, was not able to do harm on this large and handsome scale.
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You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
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I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
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Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
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It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.
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Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
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In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
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But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.
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A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.
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Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
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