Home > Work > On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
1 " That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude. "
― C.S. Lewis , On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
2 " An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. "
3 " Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible. "
4 " The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. "
5 " The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. "
6 " Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say. "
7 " I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you. "
8 " It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door. "
9 " When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. "
10 " Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers. "
11 " He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. "
12 " To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a net whereby to catch something else. "
13 " No story can be devised by the wit of man which cannot be interpreted allegorically by the wit of some other man. "
14 " If you have a religion it must be cosmic. "
15 " the ‘story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. "
16 " And when, however reverently, you have killed a word you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say. "
17 " Esta é uma das funções da arte: apresentar o que as perspectivas estreitas e desesperadamente práticas da vida real excluem. "
18 " That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most pre-occupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers. "
19 " In this sub-species [of science fiction] the author leaps forward into an imagined future when planetary, sidereal, or even galactic travel has become common. Against this huge backcloth he then proceeds to develop an ordinary love-story, spy-story, wreck-story, or crime-story. This seems to me tasteless. Whatever in a work of art is not used is doing harm. The faintly imagined, and sometimes strictly unimagineable, scene and properties, only blur the real theme and distract us from any interest it might have had. "
20 " A leap into the future, a rapid assumption of all the changes which are feigned to have occurred, is a legitimate 'machine' if it enables the author to develop a story of real value which could not have been told (or not so economically) in any other way. "
