Updated 11/30/23.
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What presumption the mere act of writing reveals!
Literary skill consists in keeping a phrase at the right temperature.
Every book written with clarity is of infinite value, even when it is full of stupid things. An author who clearly expresses his mistakes, his errors, his misunderstandings, is of more value than the one who haphazardly proclaims some truth.
The pleasure of writing, when we lack all talent and ambition, is the pleasure of knowing our ideas clearly.
I wish I could write with austerity and simplicity. I don’t mind a certain type of emphatic writing, which is admirable when accompanied by irony and a discreet smile- but the sentimental tone is abhorrent, those phrases that cause pain in both the heart and the teeth.
Writing is often unavoidable; publishing is almost always imprudent.
What our inner critic forces us to erase is usually what we have written with our most satisfied smile. Vanity strikes out what vanity creates. The true parents of every published book are despair and exhaustion.
The most disastrous misstep in letters: strict observance of the aesthetic rule of the day.
To write is to highlight a value so that life will less easily drag it into oblivion.
He who assigns importance to his words cannot be content with the demands of the common reader. He must write for the most difficult and hostile reader. Let us seek a true and clear victory over the toughest adversary.
The metaphor that does not aid in clarity but in confusion is a plague spread by those of low talent.
The broad ideas that a talented writer handles with skill dazzle the imitator, who ends up bastardizing them in rhetoric.
Writing is doing precisely the opposite of what most “writers” do.
Even in opposition to the intellectual language of a time, one cannot help but write in it.
The hand that has not learned how to caress does not know how to write.
Writing novels and stories can save us from the sluggishness into which life sinks. Perhaps the world was born from the Creator in a fit of boredom.
“Avoid the repetition of a word”: a favorite rule of rhetoric, for those who do not know how to write.
To write our thoughts is, perhaps, to create them. In any case, it is to acquire a full awareness of them. The vague idea is a mere promise, a promise unfulfilled and soon forgotten if words do not pin it down and hold it. It is true that almost all our ideas seem diminished when they are written down, and that extracting them from the fluid, rich, and fruitful context of thought, they lose the life that stirs them in the warm shadows of consciousness. But it is only when they are fleshed out in verbal pulp that we can know them, and then reject or welcome them according to their excellence.
These notes do not aspire to teach anyone anything, but to keep my life in a state of tension.
The writer gets tangled in the facts, if his sentences have no edge.
Explaining when it is possible to suggest reveals excessive contempt for the reader.
Every phrase that begins to dance must be broken through the femur.
When writing, considering a future reader forces us to be honest, and at the same time prevents us from being true.
The novelist must imbue his work with his personality so completely that his own universe is for the reader a true universe, the only universe. If the novelist doubts, his reader apostatizes.
The writer who has not tortured his sentences tortures his reader.
We do not think of writing, or even clearly formulating our thoughts, as an everyday task. Instead, most do not attempt these elementary intellectual tasks except with a certain Sunday pomp. We childishly persuade ourselves that only extraordinary things deserve to be written, or at least that the ordinary requires an elaborate style and refined diction. In reality, to speak simply of simple things is the difficult craft.
Writing is the only way to distance oneself from the era in which one was born.
To write honestly for others, you must write primarily for yourself.
When skipping intermediate ideas so as not to exasperate the reader, the writer must hold more tightly to the two extremes of his idea.
To write for posterity is not to worry whether they will read us tomorrow.
It is to aspire to a certain quality of writing.
Even when no one reads us.
The sentence must end when the verbal tension acquires its maximum intensity, a petrified wave at its crest, not when it lies on the beach.
Writing would be easy if the same phrase did not alternately appear, depending on the day and the hour, mediocre then excellent.
He who longs to write for more than a hundred readers surrenders.
A great writer is not the one who lacks defects, but the one with such talent that his defects, however apparent, are transcended, and made irrelevant.
Interesting autobiographies would abound, if writing the truth were not an aesthetic problem.
The only advice that can be given without reservation to the novice writer is to erase what he has written while moved.
The originality of a work sometimes depends on what the author does not know how to do. There is a creative impotence.
As long as he is not so imprudent as to write, many a public figure can pass as intelligent.
To write well we must decide to tactfully go beyond the dictionary of the language in which we write.
Those who write to convince end up using lies. To avoid sliding into falsehoods, you have to write with disdain.
It is true that almost all our ideas seem diminished once they are written, and that by extracting them from the rich, fluid, and fruitful context of thought, they lose the life that stirs them in the warm gloom of our consciousness. But it is only when they are fleshed out verbally that we can know them, and then reject or accept them according to their excellence.
We should not write how we speak, but how we ought to speak.
The one who writes the worst is the one who imitates the one who writes well.
The abundance of mediocrity, as well as our own insecurity, convinces us not to write. Or, if we cannot avoid it, to write discreetly and for ourselves. Whether writing is for us a game or the most serious of acts, it is no surprise we should have the same modesty with our writing as we do with gestures of love: so satisfying, but so repugnant to everyone else.
Erudition does not consist of adding a vast number of references, but rather making the reader believe that we could.
Being ordinary and customary, but not predictable, is the secret of good prose.
We must write, simultaneously, as if no one was going to read us and as if everyone were going to read us.
The only book for which I have enough material would be the autobiography of a mediocre man; but unfortunately even that book requires talent to be written.
When what we write does not seem obsolete to the modern, immature to the adult, and trivial to the serious, we must start over.
My only pretension is that the book I have written is not linear, but concentric.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
