Treatise on Style

Some memorable passages from Louis Aragon's Treatise on Style.

"I trample syntax because it must be trampled."

"Difficult is an epithet that can be applied only to the definite. That is why art is not difficult. Nor is it easy."

"What on earth is modern exegesis up to? ...out to rake the muck of metaphors...those sentence chasers."

"What is worth saying is worth saying twice and more."

"Dada is your knight...In its light, all your recent bad taste seems unforgivable and it sails from you like a little ship."

"We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later."