“Even when I’m stretched out in my coffin they may find me tinkering with some poem. Even published poems I won’t leave alone. I very rarely get it right in one go. Mostly I revise endlessly. I don’t keep old drafts, but I imagine in some cases they must number into the hundreds. There’s a danger in endlessly tinkering like that. I’ve ruined many poems, took all the life out of them by not letting them remain a bit awkward, nonsensical, and inept. At times, such ‘weaknesses’ give the poem whatever charm it has, but it’s not easy to know until one tries to improve it.” – Charles Simic, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review
“There’s no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one’s pocket would serve as well as any university.” – Charles Simic, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review
“It’s mind-boggling to discover that a word, a phrase, or an entire poem perfectly understandable in one language cannot be translated into another. Whatever the answer to this puzzle, it has something to do with the relationship of experience to language and the way each language encompasses a particular worldview. In fact, it’s not only a question for poetry to concern itself with, but for philosophy, too, to ponder.” – Charles Simic, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review
“I’ve always been curious about these little creatures going their merry way, taking care of business—whatever that business is. Flies are neurotic, moths are crazy, but for serenity you can’t beat a butterfly. Even ants seem pretty cool. When I was little I used to step on them out of sheer nastiness or boredom. Now I can’t hurt a flea that’s biting me.” – Charles Simic, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review
“I grew up in a slaughterhouse. We were not only occupied, but there was a civil war going on with multiple factions fighting each other. Blood in the streets was not a figure of speech, but something I saw again and again. There’s no question that all that had a lot to do with my outlook on life. Innocent human beings get killed—that was my earliest lesson. Whenever I read about a ‘just war’ in which thousands of innocents have died or will die, I want to jump out of my skin.” – Charles Simic, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review
“One of the distinct advantages of growing up in a place where one is apt to find men hung from lampposts as one walks to school is that it cuts down on grumbling about life as one grows older.” – Charles Simic, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review
“My mother was a woman of incredible personal courage and integrity whose political views proved to be much more lucid and prophetic than my father’s, but from day to day she was no fun to be with. She expected only the worst. If she sent me to the corner grocery for a bottle of milk she would fret and imagine every awful thing happening to me and was astonished to see me return safe and sound. The horrors of war left a much bigger impact on her than on the rest of us.” – Charles Simic, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review
“Language is magic. It is invocation and conjuration. With words, we summon the seas and the forests, the stars and distant galaxies, the past and the future and the fabulous, the real and the unreal, the possible and the impossible. With words, we create worlds—in imagination, in the realm of ideas, in the arena of history. With words, we disclose things otherwise hidden, including even our inward selves. And so on. When you write, attempt to weave a spell. If this is not your intention, do not write.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Know the names of things and the names of places. Both are a kind of poetry and both contain mysteries. It is an ancient intuition that to possess something’s proper name is to possess power over it; it is, if nothing else, to share in that thing’s form—its unique manner, that is, of making being’s inexhaustible richness manifest.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“One day you will die and go to your long home and your voice will fall silent. You have only so much time to make the treasures of your mind and soul manifest. Do not waste the little span allotted to you producing only work intended for the moment rather than for posterity.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Do not write down to what you presume to be the level of your readers (unless you are writing specifically for very small children). To do so is an injustice both to them and to you. Even if your suppositions regarding them are correct, you should do them the honor of assuming they know what you know, or can learn it, or are at least willing to try. True, some readers become indignant at their own inability to follow prose of any complexity or to recognize words any more obscure than those they are accustomed to using when talking to their dogs. Invariably they will blame the author rather than themselves. You owe them absolutely nothing. If you attempt always to descend to the lowest common denominator, you will never hit bottom, but you will certainly end up losing the interest of better readers.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Those who read only to be informed and never to delight in the words on the page have every right to do so. But do not write for them.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language’s miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality. Second only to the semicolon in subtlety, fluent beauty, and whimsy is the dash. Cherish it. Use it with abandon.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“If you were told in school that Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is a specimen of good writing, disabuse yourself of this folly. It is in fact an excruciating specimen of bad schoolboy prose, written by a man who by that point had, alas, been too often drunk, too often concussed, and too often praised.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“If you have ever taken a course in ‘creative writing,’ try to remember as vividly as possible the kind of prose you were encouraged by your teacher to write, and then do your very best to avoid writing that way.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Always read what you have written aloud. No matter how elaborate your prose, it must flow; it must feel genuinely continuous. This is not to say one must imitate natural speech; it is only to say that one must try to capture its rhythms. If what you have written is awkward on your tongue, then it is awkward on the page.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“If you own a copy of The Elements of Style, just destroy the damned thing. It is a pestilential presence in your library. Most of the rules of style it contains are vacuous, arbitrary, or impossible to obey, and you are better off without them in your life. And the materials on grammar and usage are frequently something worse. Some of them are simply inherited fake rubrics—‘however’ must always be a postpositive, ‘which’ must not be used for a restrictive relative clause, and other nonsense of that kind—all of which are belied by the whole canon of English literature.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“One of the chief differences between actual linguistic meaning (on the one hand) and mere ostensive noises and gestures (on the other) is the former’s reliance upon structural rather than spatial proximities. The capacity to qualify a predicative phrase by the interpolation of a subordinate clause (for example) is one of those precious attainments that distinguish us from baboons.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“English is a gloriously mongrel tongue, and it has always pillaged other languages for glittering trinkets.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Never prefer a short word because it is short or a long word because it is long, but always use the word that to your mind best combines sense, felicity, connotation, wit, and sound, without worrying about whether your readers are likely to recognize it.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Sometimes less is more. More often, more is more and less is less. Sometimes more is the very least one can do for one’s readers.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Be kind to your readers and give them exotic things when you can. In general, life is rather boring, and a writer should try to mitigate that boredom rather than contribute to it.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Do not use a thesaurus. Lists of putative synonyms do not give you a sense of any word’s most proper meaning and use. If you are trying to recall a word you know that inexplicably refuses to surface in your memory, maybe you will find it in such a volume; and perhaps, if you happen to be writing humorous verse and have come up against an intractable problem of scansion, you might find something suitable there. Otherwise, learn the meanings and uses of words by reading widely.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Never use a word simply because it is obscure, but never hesitate to use a word on account of its obscurity either.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose” (emphasis in original)
“When the occasion presents itself for using an outlandishly obscure but absolutely precise and appropriate word, use it.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Always use the word you judge most suitable for the effect you want to produce, in terms both of imagery and sound, as well as of the range of connotations and associations you want to evoke.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Always use the word that most exactly means what you wish to say, in utter indifference to how common or familiar that word happens to be. A writer should never fret over what his or her readers may or may not know, and should worry only about underestimating them.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“To propose a list of rules for writers is probably a very presumptuous thing to do. The only authority it can possibly have is one’s own example, and so offering it to the world is something of a gamble. One has to assume that one’s own writing is impressive enough to most readers to provide one with the necessary credentials for the task. If one is wrong on this score, issuing those rules will invite only ridicule.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“I do not know exactly why, in the twentieth century, the dominant fashions in English prose moved relentlessly in the direction of ever greater simplification and aesthetic minimalism. I do not even entirely regret it. Tastes change, and some of the change has been a corrective of certain excesses of the past. But, on the whole, the result has been a kind of official dogma in favor of a prose so denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality as to be often little better than infantile, not only in vocabulary but also in artistry and expressive power—a formula, that is, for producing writers whose voices are utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness. Most of the fiction one reads today in literary journals is atrociously written, as are most of the essays, principally because writers have been indoctrinated in a style so rigid, barren, brutal, dry, and idiotically naïve that the best it can elicit from them is competent dullness.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Poetry entered the world almost as early as words did; it is the first flowering of language’s intrinsic magic—its powers of invocation and apostrophe, of making the absent present and the present mysterious, of opening one mind to another. It comes most naturally to languages in their first dawn, when something elemental—something somehow pre-linguistic and not quite conscious—is still audible in them. Prose, however, evolves only when that force has been subdued by centuries upon centuries of refinement, after unconscious enchantment has been largely mastered by conscious artistry, and when the language has acquired a vocabulary of sufficient richness and a syntax of sufficient subtlety, and has fully discovered its native cadences.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”