Henry Green Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

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

Henry Green
At my public school I had hated every other face for fear the owner was a lord, at university, I was to court the rich while doubting whether there should be great inequalities between incomes.

Henry Green
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... 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...

Henry Green
We leave our marks behind us, like a snail.

Henry Green
I didn't want my business associates to know I wrote novels. Most of them do now, though ... know I mean, not write, thank goodness.

Henry Green
As far as I'm consciously aware, I forget everything I read at once, including my own stuff.

Henry Green
The writer must be disengaged or else he is writing politics. Look at the Soviet writers.

Henry Green
I think Joyce and Kafka have said the last word on each of the two forms they developed. There's no one to follow them. They're like cats which have licked the plate clean. You've got to dream up another dish if you're to be a writer.
On the writing style o James Joyce and Franz Kafka

Henry Green
If you are trying to write something which has a life of its own, which is alive, of course the author must keep completely out of the picture.

Henry Green
The whole of life now is of course absurd— hilarious sometimes, [...] but basically absurd.

Henry Green
I wanted to make that book as taut and spare as possible, to fit the proletarian life I was then leading. So I hit on leaving out the articles. I still think it effective, but would not do it again. It may now seem, I'm afraid, affected.
On the absence of common articles—“a,” “an,” and “the” — on his novel "Living"

Henry Green
On the qualities of a work of art:
To be alive. To have a real life of its own. The miracle is that it should live in the person who reads it. And if it is real and true, it does, for five hundred years, for generation after generation.

Henry Green