Quotes from Gerald Brenan

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death does.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

The cliche is dead poetry.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.

You generally hear that what a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him, but in business what a man doesn't know does hurt.

Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.

The more we feel sorry for ourselves, the less sorry others will feel for us. People don't waste their small store of sympathy on those who can provide it so richly for themselves.

A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.

Do not believe those persons who say they have never been jealous. What they mean is that they have never been in love.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

The cliche is dead poetry.

We are closer to the ants than to butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.

When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.