kurt-anderson.com

I feel weird putting this out there, but George Orwell is one of my literary heroes!

While I aspire to be a novelist, I tend (both by nature and by instruction) toward essays and, ever since I read his Politics and the English Language, I’ve been enamored.
I’m not saying that Orwell is the best essayist to grace the English tongue but, along with Michele de Montaigne (whose work, incidentally, is probably my only motivation to learn French), his style points to my imagined ideal. (That last sentence would’ve made him kick me.)

Anyway, today I read an essay of his that I hadn’t read yet. While it’s mainly about writing and writers, I think that it’s a good five-minute investment for anyone that loves well-written, straightforward prose.

Some excerpts:

No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.

I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Great stuff, no? I encourage you to read the full essay (or, for that matter, any of Orwell’s other essays) in one of your many spare moments. You won’t regret it.