Quotes from Henry Green

To me the purpose of art is to produce something alive...but with a separate, and of course one hopes, with an everlasting life of its own.

The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it.

The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.

To me the purpose of art is to produce something alive...but with a separate, and of course one hopes, with an everlasting life of its own.

I can't understand why people can't go on just being ordinary to each other even if they are in love.

I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: 'Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.' I saw the book in a flash.

But she said it so low, so quietly this time that no one followed her. Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone.

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone ...

it was these desperate inexperienced bitches, he thought, who never banded together but fought everyone and themselves and were like camels, they could go on for days without one sup of encouragement. Under their humps they had tanks of self-confidence so that they could cross any desert area of arid prickly pear without one compliment, or dewdrop as they called it in his family, to uphold them.

A novel has a whispering complexity of insinuations.

After fifty, one ceases to digest. As someone once said, "I just ferment my food now."