F. L. Lucas Quotes

• Every author’s fairy godmother should provide him not only with a pen but also with a blue pencil.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Human temperaments are too diverse; we can never agree how drunk we like our art to be.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The virtues common to good living and good poetry seem to me not so much matters of what used to be called ‘virtue’ as, above all, of sane vitality.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Unintelligible, the borrowings cheap and the notes useless.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Most style is not honest enough.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Enough, Honest, Style

• A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense at all.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Nonsense, Tomorrow, Himself

• Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly… in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Better, Poetry, Pulpit

• At Munich we sold the Czechs for a few months grace, but the disgrace will last as long as history.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in History

  Tags in Long, Last, Grace

• Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Trust

  Tags in Simple, Few, Rules

• And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Rather, Impress

• The most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader’s mind. It has, in fact, the last word.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Mind, End, Place

• The only hope I can see for the future depends on a wiser and braver use of the reason, not a panic flight from it.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Future

  Tags in Reason, Hope, Depends

• The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn… tired of common sense and civilization.

  F. L. Lucas

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Men, Civilization, World

F. L. Lucas (13)

Birth:	1894
Death:	1967
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Critic, Intelligence Officer, Lecturer, Novelist, Politician, Scholar

About

Frank Laurence Lucas was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II. He is now best remembered for his scathing attacks on the poetry of T. S. Eliot during the 1920s, and for his book Style, an acclaimed guide to recognising and writing good prose. His Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics' was for over half a century a standard introduction.

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