I found some quotes from stuff I like jotted down in a notebook the other day and thought I’d share some of them with you. Here’s the first batch, a small, numbered, single-barrel batch.

On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner

p. 42. Teaching creative writing, one constantly hears students say of their work, “I am trying to show . . .” The error of this is obvious once it’s pointed out. Does the twenty- or twenty-five-year-old writer really have brilliant insights that the intelligent reading public (doctors, lawyers, professors, skilled machinists, business men) has never before heard or thought of? If the young novelist’s answer is an emphatic yes, he would do the world a favor by entering the ministry or the Communist party. If I belabor the point, I do so only because the effect of English literature courses is so often, for a certain kind of student, insidious.

p. 43. One of the great temptations of young writers is to believe that all the people in the subdivision in which he grew up were fools and hypocrites in need of blasting or instruction. As he matures, the writer will come to realize, with luck, that the people he scorned had important virtues, that they had better heads and hearts, than he knew. The desire to show people proper beliefs and attitudes is inimical to the noblest impulses of fiction.

In honor of New Year’s Day, here’s an excerpt from Jeeves Takes Charge on New Year’s Eve.

I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without. “I was sent by the agency, sir,” he said. “I was given to understand that you required a valet.”

I’d have preferred an undertaker, but I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That impressed me from the start.

Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the lads. “Excuse me, sir,” he said gently.

Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn’t there any longer. I heard him moving about in the kitchen, and presently he came back with a glass on a tray.

“If you would drink this, sir,” he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince.

“It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlement have told me that have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.”

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

“You’re engaged!” I sad, as soon as I could say anything.

I perceived clearly that this cove was one of the world’s wonder workers, the sort no home should be without.

“Thank you sir. My name is Jeeves.”