Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7873

Q: For an effective style, reading is very necessary. In order to manufacture your style, which is incomparable, your enormous reading must have helped a lot, I am sure.

A: Excuse me! I never manufactured my style; style with any life in it cannot be manufactured. It is born and grows like any other living thing. Of course, it was fed on my reading which was not enormous – I have read comparatively little – (there are people in India who have read fifty times or a hundred times as much as I have), only I have made much out of that little. For the rest it is Yoga that has developed my style by the development of consciousness, fineness and accuracy of thought and vision, increasing inspiration and an increasing intuitive discrimination (self-critical) of right thought, word-form, just image and figure.

29-10-1935