a literary man, that’s a strange idea. He was the most unliterary bloke that ever succeeded in literature and his style is a howling desert.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
CWSA 27
Fragment ID: 6770
Reading, Yogic Force and the Development of Style [3]
To try to be a literary man and yet not to know what big literary people have contributed would be inexcusable.
Why is it inexcusable? I don’t know what the Japanese or the Soviet Russian writers have contributed, but I feel quite happy and moral in my ignorance. As for reading Dickens in order to be a literary man, that’s a strange idea. He was the most unliterary bloke that ever succeeded in literature and his style is a howling desert.
19 September 1936