Will you tell me, 'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well'? Can he, indeed? ... Can you, sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

Categorized in : You Me Art Life

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

crafts pieces writing

We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another's success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

mistake discovery watches

If your language is confused, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

confused language character

O pastoral heart of England! like a psalm Of green days telling w... by Arthur Quiller-Couch

O pastoral heart of England! like a psalm Of green days telling with a quiet beat.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

green england heart

You can see the meaning of the statement that "Literature is a living art" most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes - say Pure Mathematics and Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

men two art

I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

lips thrill fall

Portraits of other great ones look down on you in your college halls; but while you are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?

Arthur Quiller-Couch

down great look you

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to know it in any reputable sense of the word - let alone your learning to write English - is, in short, impossible.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

alone learning business impossible

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.'

Arthur Quiller-Couch

feel me you writing

By all means, let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes, but let us study them for our guidance: that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

own great time past

The more clearly you write, the more easily and surely you will b... by Arthur Quiller-Couch

The more clearly you write, the more easily and surely you will be understood.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

write more will you

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

until you crave knowledge

The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

library tragedy taste real

Against Knowledge I have, as the light cynic observed of a certain lady's past, only one serious objection - that there is so much of it.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

serious light past knowledge