The Arnold Bennett Calendar

When one has really something to say, one does not use clichés; one cannot.

The extinguishing of desire, with an accompanying indifference, be it high or low, is bad for youth.

Do you suppose that if the fame of Shakespeare depended on the man in the street, it would survive a fortnight?

Common-sense will solve any problem—any!—always provided it is employed simultaneously with politeness.

London is the most provincial town in England—invariably vulgar, reactionary, hysterical, and behind the rest of the country. A nice sort of place England would be if we in the provinces had to copy London.

Progress is the gradual result of the unending battle between human reason and human instinct, in which the former slowly but surely wins.

As an athlete trains, as an acrobat painfully tumbles in private, so must the literary aspirant write.

A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature.

It is said that geography makes history. In England, and especially in London, weather makes a good deal of history.

The one primary essential to literary taste is a hot interest in literature. If you have that, all the rest will come.

In the Five Towns human nature is reported to be so hard that you can break stones on it. Yet sometimes it softens, and then we have one of our rare idylls of which we are very proud, while pretending not to be. The soft and delicate South would possibly not esteem highly our idylls, as such. Nevertheless they are our idylls, idyllic for us, and reminding us, by certain symptoms, that, though we never cry, there is concealed somewhere within our bodies a fount of happy tears.

Reason is the basis of personal dignity.

It is by the passionate few that the renown of genius is kept alive from one generation to another.

We are all of us the same in essence; what separates us is merely differences in our respective stages of evolution.

It is well known that dignity will only bleed while you watch it. Avert your eyes and it instantly dries up.

All literature is the expression of feeling, of passion, of emotion, caused by a sensation of the interestingness of life.

Just as science is the development of common-sense, so is literature the development of common daily speech.

Every man who thinks clearly can write clearly, if not with grace and technical correctness.

It is important, if you wish ultimately to have a wide, catholic taste, to guard against the too common assumption that nothing modern will stand comparison with the classics.

In the matter of its own special activities the brain is usually undisciplined and unreliable. We never know what it will do next.

It’s the dodge of every begging-letter writer in England to mark his envelope “Private and Urgent.”

Women grow old; women cease to learn; but men, never.

In literature, but in nothing else, I am a propagandist; I am not content to keep my opinion and let others keep theirs. To have a worthless book in my house (save in the way of business), to know that any friend is enjoying it, actually distresses me. That book must go, the pretensions of that book must be exposed, if I am to enjoy peace of mind.

I have often thought: If a son could look into a mother’s heart, what an eyeopener he would have!

When a writer expresses his individuality and his mood with accuracy, lucidity, and sincerity, and with an absence of ugliness, then he achieves good style. Style—it cannot be too clearly understood—is not a certain splendid something which the writer adds to his meaning. It is in the meaning; it is that part of the meaning which specially reflects his individuality and his mood.

Crime is simply a convenient monosyllable which we apply to what happens when the brain and the heart come into conflict and the brain is defeated.

Reflect that, as a rule, the people whom you have come to esteem communicated themselves to you gradually, that they did not begin the entertainment with fireworks.

To devise the contents of an issue, to plan them, to balance them; to sail with this wind and tack against that; to keep a sensitive, cool finger on the faintly beating pulse of the terrible many-headed patron; to walk in a straight line through a forest black as midnight; to guess the riddle of the circulation-book week by week; to know by instinct why Smiths sent in a repeat order, or why Simpkins’ was ten quires less; to keep one eye on the majestic march of the world, and the other on the vagaries of a bazaar-reporter who has forgotten the law of libel; these things, and seventy-seven others, are the real journalism. It is these things that make editors sardonic, grey, unapproachable.

I will be bold enough to say that quite seventy per cent. of ambition is never realised at all, and that ninety per cent. of all realised ambition is fruitless.

To comply with the regulations ordained by English Society for the conduct of successful painters, he ought, first, to have taken the elementary precaution of being born in the United States. He ought, after having refused all interviews for months, to have ultimately granted a special one to a newspaper with the largest circulation. He ought to have returned to England, grown a mane and a tufted tail, and become the king of beasts; or at least to have made a speech at a banquet about the noble and purifying mission of art. Assuredly, he ought to have painted the portrait of his father or grandfather as an artisan to prove that he was not a snob.

Women enjoy a reputation for slipshod style. They have earned it. A long and intimate familiarity with the manuscript of hundreds of women-writers, renowned and otherwise, has convinced me that not ten per cent. of them can be relied upon to satisfy even the most ordinary tests in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I do not hesitate to say that if twenty of the most honoured and popular women-writers were asked to sit for an examination in these simple branches of learning, the general result (granted that a few might emerge with credit) would not only startle themselves, but would provide innocent amusement for the rest of mankind.