A Collection of Essays

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(v) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

”When Tropic of Cancer was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler’s concentration camps were already bulging. The international foci of the of the world were Rome, Moscow, and Berlin. It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written about American dead-beats edging drinks in the Latin Quarter (France). Of course a novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history, but a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot.”

”When I first opened Tropic of Cancer and saw that it was full of imprintable words, my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed. Most people’s would be the same, I believe. Nevertheless after a lapse of time, the atmosphere of the book, besides innumerable details, seemed to linger in my memory in a peculiar way. Together with his other book, Black Spring, these two books “created a world of their own” as the saying goes. The books that do this are not necessarily good books, they maybe good bad books like Raffles or the Sherlock Holmes stories, or perverse and morbid books like Wuthering Heights or The House of the Green Shutters… Read him (Miller) for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. ” He knows all about me,” you feel; “he wrote this especially for me.” It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike.”

(1) Sheer egoism
(2) Esthetic enthusiasm
(3) Historical impulse
(4) Political purpose

I understood to perfection what it meant to be Lucifer, defeated and justly defeated, with no possibility of revenge. The schoolmasters with their canes, the millionaires with their Scottish castles, the athletes with their curly hair- these were the armies of the unalterable law. It was not easy, at that date, to realize that in fact it was alterable. And according to the law I was damned. I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt... at the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish."

"When you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces- besides there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names?"

"In mid-19th century America men felt themselves free and equal, were free and equal, so far as that is possible outside a society of pure communism. There was poverty and there were even class distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class."

"But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. 'He knows all about me,' you feel, 'he wrote this specially for me.'