Remarks by Ford Madox Hueffer | V2Melody Quotations

“I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time.”

Defining the novelist as a recorder and interpreter of contemporary history · It Was the Nightingale

“We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render impressions.”

The writer should recreate the felt experience of life rather than merely recount events · Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance

“We accepted the name of impressionists because we saw that Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains.”

Explaining the principle behind Ford and Conrad’s literary impressionism · Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance

“For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.”

Capturing the divided and wandering nature of human consciousness · Essay, On Impressionism

“There are probably—humanity being stable, change the world how it may—there are probably eternal principles for all the arts, but the applications of those principles are eternally changing, or eternally revolving.”

Art combines enduring principles with continually changing forms and practices · The English Novel

“For it is a mistake to think that what looks like the rendering of an ordinary affair is ever an artless chronicling.”

Apparently effortless realism may conceal considerable artistic construction · The English Novel

“Having got your subject you will, if you are prudent, live with it for a long, long time before you sit down to write it.”

Good writing benefits from allowing a subject to mature before composition begins · The English Novel

“The appeal of the subject is nevertheless the only thing that is open to your native genius—the only thing as to which you can say: I cannot help it: that is what appealed to me.”

The deepest choice of subject arises from instinct rather than calculation · The English Novel

“You must therefore write as simply as you can—with the extreme of the simplicity that is granted to you, and you must write of subjects that spring at your throat.”

Writing should combine clarity with subjects that demand the writer’s attention · The English Novel

“The nearer you are to universality the greater you are, the more nearly you will have justified your existence.”

Artistic greatness lies in reaching experiences shared across individual differences · The English Novel

“The only sound technical rules are those that are founded on a study of what pleases: if what you write is to please you must see how your predecessors did it.”

Craft develops through attentive study of effective writing from the past · The English Novel

“He has, that is to say, to render and not to tell.”

Ford’s concise formulation of the novelist’s task of presenting rather than explaining · The English Novel

“But the really great writer is not bound by the conventions of his day, nor, if he desires to give his reader a happy ending, need he select a wastrel like Jones as the recipient of his too easily bestowed favours.”

Great writers need not surrender their artistic judgement to contemporary convention · The English Novel

“For myself, I am no moralist: I consider that if you do what you want you must take what you get for it and that if you deny yourself things you will be better off than if you don’t.”

A compact statement of personal responsibility and self-restraint · The English Novel

“One is here to commend all that one can commend and to leave the rest alone.”

A generous principle for approaching the work of fellow writers · The English Novel

“God forbid that I should say anything really condemnatory of any book by any brother-novelist, alive or dead.”

A wry declaration of fellow feeling towards other writers before offering criticism · The English Novel

“The lot of the novelist is, in fact, hard—but not harder than that of any other man.”

Refusing to romanticise the difficulties of the writer’s profession · The English Novel

“It is bitter bad for the English novel because—as is the case with all human enterprises—the art of the novel is so difficult a thing that unless a man’s whole energies are given to it he had much better otherwise occupy himself.”

Ford insists that serious writing demands sustained commitment to craft · The English Novel

“The great art of the world is found in books that are familiar to millions, if not the world over, then, at any rate, down several ages of several continents.”

Enduring and widespread readership is presented as one sign of artistic greatness · The English Novel

“The knowledge of the art of novel writing is open to every one who takes the trouble to like one book better than another and the literary tastes of men are fairly identical the world over and throughout time.”

Literary judgement begins with attentive reading rather than specialised authority · The English Novel

“For there is no other criterion of art but success, and the more lasting the success the better the art.”

Judging artistic achievement by its enduring power to reach an audience · The English Novel

“First impressions are the strongest of all, and once you have established in that way the character of one of your figures you will find it very hard to change it.”

A practical observation on characterisation and the lasting force of first impressions · The English Novel

“It is, in short, unbearable to exist without some view of life as a whole, for one finds oneself daily in predicaments in which some sort of a pointer is absolutely necessary.”

Human beings need patterns and examples through which to interpret experience · The English Novel

“Scenes on the other hand presented with even a minimum of artistry will remain in the mind as long as life lasts.”

Artistic presentation can give experiences a permanence that ordinary information lacks · The English Novel

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