'Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be'

Please excuse my manners as I empty a bag of letters on your doorstep and flee

Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

C. S. Lewis 
Letter to a young fan named Joan Lancaster
June 1956

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Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and, when you are, you will be less eager for celebrity.

Robert Southey
Letter to Charlotte Brontë 
12th March 1837

—Brontë was 20 at the time. Jane Eyre was published a decade later.

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Oh, Henry, I can’t bear to be writing you—I want you desperately, I want to open my legs so wide, I’m melting and palpitating. I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them.

Anaïs Nin 
Letter to Henry Miller
6th August 1932

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I would rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!

Miwnay
Letter to her husband, Nanai-dhat
4th Century

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Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

James Baldwin
Letter to his nephew
1962

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I have the villain of a headache, my eyes are two piss holes in the sand, my tongue is fish-and-chip paper.

Dylan Thomas, mid-hangover
Letter to Trevor Hughes
One Spring morning, 1934

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DO NOT, repeat DO NOT be so bloody vulnerable. To hell with God damned “L’Amour.” It always causes far more trouble than it is worth. Don’t run after it. Don’t court it. Keep it waiting off stage until you’re good and ready for it and even then treat it with the suspicious disdain that it deserves.

Noël Coward
Letter to Marlene Dietrich
1956

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Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Xavier High School
5th November 2006

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If the felicity of last night has had the same effect on your health as on my countenance, you have no cause to lament your failure of resolution, for I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections, very dear, called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.

Mary Wollstonecraft
Letter to William Godwin
13th November 1796

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