Henry Seidel Canby Quotes & Sayings

If the bell of intolerance tolls for one, it tolls for all. — Henry Seidel Canby

Good writing is always a breaking of the soil, clearing away prejudices, pulling up of sour weeds of crooked thinking, stripping the turf so as to get at what is fertile beneath. It would be amusing to carry the simile further. Those bulbs that flower in the sand and wither! The gay fiction annual that has to be planted again every year! Those experimental plants from Russia, France, and Greenwich Village that are always getting winter killed - confound 'em! - is it worth while planting them again? The stocky perennial that keeps coming up and coming up - so easy to grow and so ugly. Scarlet sage that gives a touch of fiery sin to the edge of the suburbanite's concrete walk! And then the good flowers - as honest as they are beautiful! The well-ordered gar den! The climbing rose that escapes and is the most beautiful of all! — Henry Seidel Canby

A short story is simplification to the highest degree — Henry Seidel Canby

The short story, its course plotted and its form proscribed, has become too efficient ... but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature — Henry Seidel Canby

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature
poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. — Henry Seidel Canby

Flatulency today consists in saying simply in several different ways the same thing over and over again. — Henry Seidel Canby

Arrogance, pedantry, and dogmatism ... the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young. — Henry Seidel Canby

While the novel-writer aims at an eminently natural method of transcription, the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one — Henry Seidel Canby

The London 'Academy' has seen fit recently to scoff at the critics who have been exercising themselves ove rthe so-called art of the Short Story ... But the new Short Story has gained more individuality. It supports the magazines and has invaded the newspapers — Henry Seidel Canby

Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming. — Henry Seidel Canby

The function of the Short Story is to be interesting, to convey vivid impressions, an therefore it must, to a degree, work with the evident and superficial thing — Henry Seidel Canby

Live deep instead of fast. I think this is what Thoreau meant. — Henry Seidel Canby