Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7896

Q: To try to be a literary man and yet not to know what big literary people have contributed would be inexcusable.

A: 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.

19-9-1936