Interview, Telegraph Review, 2013
“Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.”
“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good”
Address on sentencing (1885)
Context: The Court. has done the work for me, and although at first appearance it seems to be against me, I am so confident in the idea which I have had the honor to express yesterday, that I think it is for good and not for my loss. Up to this moment, I have been considered by a certain party as insane, by another party as a criminal, by another party as a man with whom it was doubtful whether to have any intercourse. So there was hostility and there was contempt, and there was avoidance To-day, by the verdict of the Court, one of these three situations has disappeared.
I suppose that after having been condemned, I will cease to be called a fool, and for me it is a great advantage. I consider it as a great advantage. If I have a mission, I say "If " for the sake of those who doubt, but for my part it means "Since," since I have a mission, I cannot fulfil my mission as long as I am looked upon as an insane being-human being, at the moment that I begin to ascend that scale, I begin to succeed.
Variant: What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life.
Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 12
“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.”
“The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.”
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
“If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.”
Variant translation: It is strange. If an idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you will actually smell it in the wind.
As translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
Tonio Kröger (1903)
“That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.”
1770, p. 181
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II
