“Nine years’ advertising experience rubbed it into me that it is wiser never to put a wrong idea into a reader’s mind, even negatively.”

-Letter to Uvedele Lambert, 1953 (Wade Center)

“I will say for the Americans that, although they are very slow to learn from example they are extremely quick to learn from experience. That is why they are usually very bad soldiers at the beginning of a campaign and very good ones at the end of it, when they have learned to keep their heads down (a thing they will never suffer other people to tell them!)”

- Letter to Doris McCarthy, 12 April 1948 (Vol.3)

“Nobody knows what America thinks, not even Americans.”

-Letter to Barbara Reynolds, 21 Feb. 1950 (Vol. 3)

“Teachers further complain that they have to spend a great deal of time in teaching University students what to ask. This indicates that the young mind experiences great difficulty in entangling the essence of a subject from its accidents.”

-Preface to The Mind of the Maker

“…a cousin of my own once demanded, ‘Mother, where has yesterday gone to?’ My aunt courageously undertook to find out; but by the time she returned, primed with the opinion of an eminent Oxford philosopher, the inquirer had lost interest and, like jesting Pilate, would not tay for an answer.”

-The Mind of the Maker, Ch. VII

“I’m glad to know that you like St. Augustine. I first read the Confessions when I was about twenty-three, and found it so exciting I couldn’t put it down. Between Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and Dante’s Divine Comedy, with whichI fell in love when I was nearly fifty, I don’t think I encountered anything of its kind so enthralling.”

-Letter to Joan Nolan, 12 Oct. 1949 (Vol. 3)

“It is quite true they [British citizens during WWII] ought not to be idle and bored, but the fact remains that they are, simply because they are the produce of a standardised civilization which does their thinking and feeling for them, and because it is a very long and difficult job for them to learn, at this late hour of the day, to think for themselves.” -Letter to Sir Richard Acland, 17 April 1940 (Vol. 2)

“I think in some ways G.K.’s books have become more a part of my mental makeup than those of any writer you could name.” -Letter to Mrs. G.K. Chesterton upon his death, 15 June, 1936 (Vol. 1)

“I should like to say, on my own behalf, how important I feel your husband’s work to have been in showing us how to dignify a kind of literature [detective stories] which had fallen on very bad ways by restoring to it that touch with the greater realities which it had almost entirely lost.”

-Letter to Mrs. G.K. Chesterton upon his death, 15 June, 1936 (Vol. 1)

“Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in gusts of fresh air…”

-Preface to Chesterton’s play, The Surprise

“I must personally eliminate all situations which would confine either mind or body in steel or whalebone.”

-”If You Had to Live in a Play or Novel,” Strand Magazine, Dec. 1935

“Let us take this terrible business - so distressing to the minds of bishops - of the women who go about in trousers. We are asked: ‘Why do you want to go about in trousers? They are extremely unbecoming to most of you. You only do it to copy the men.’ To this we may very properly reply: ‘It is true that they are unbecoming. Even on men they are remarkably unattractive. But, as you men have discovered for yourselves, they are comfortable, they do not get in the way of one’s activities like skirts and they protect the wearer from draughts about the ankles. As a human being, I like comfort and dislike draughts. If the trousers do not attract you, so much the worse; for the moment I do not want to attract you. I want to enjoy myself as a human being, and why not? As for copying you, certainly you thought of trousers first and to that extent we must copy you. But we are not such abandoned copy-cats as to attach these useful garments to our bodies with braces. There we draw the line. These machines of leather and elastic are unnecessary and unsuited to the female form.” -”Are Women Human?” 1938

“Ha, ha! Now you really have got a language to deal with! No pale, correct, pure-blooded aristocrat, but a great gorging, guzzling, base-begot trollop of a language, that will assimilate anything, go to bed with anybody, and can’t tell you which of ten drunken sailors is her father.”

-Letter to Barbara Reynolds, 5 Sept., 1956 (Vol. 4)

“Nowadays, all the publishing houses print ‘medieval’ (unless one firmly instructs them not to) for no reason that I can see - unless it is that having replaced the ‘e’ in ‘judgement’ they think they must make a corresponding economy somewhere.” -

Letter to Lewis Thorpe, 7 Oct., 1957 (Vol.4)

“I am afraid opera is one of  the forms of entertainment that I very seldom patronise, so that I cannot be said to have any favourite selection. Anyway, why this craze for other people’s ‘favorites’ - as though great works of music and literature were a kind of pet animal. I am sorry, but I am completely allergic to this kind of bosh!”

- Letter to Stephen Williams, 14 Feb. 1945 (Vol. 3)

“We have no reliable record except of a person who from the start assumed the divine authority to forgive sins in His own name, and put his own commands on a level with the Law delivered from Sinai. This in a Jew could have only one meaning. Consequently, if Jesus was not God, He was either a liar or a lunatic, and very far from a ‘perfect man’. The ‘human Jesus’ so dear to the nineteenth-century liberal mind has not been able to stand modern critical examination.”

-Letter to Irene Amesbury, 1 June 1945 (Vol. 3)

“One trouble about C.S. Lewis, I think, is his fervent missionary zeal. I welcome his able dialectic, and he is a tremendous hammer for heretics. But he is apt to think that one should rush into every fray and strike a blow for Christendom, whether or not one is equipped by training and temperament for that particular conflict.”

-Letter to Br. George Every, 10 July, 1947 (Vol. 3)

“Lewis is magnificently ruthless with the people who do set out to produce what purports to be a logical argument and then fake the premises, or beg the question, or leave their middles undistribtued, or use ambivalent terms, or smuggle the concept of time into an argument about eternity, or ignorantly confuse efficient causes with final causes and attribute the resulting absurdity to St. Thomas. He is down on the thing like a rat; he is God’s terrier, and I wouldn’t be without him for the world.”

-Letter to Br. George Every, 10 July, 1947 (Vol. 3)

“For there are only two good reasons for writing a play (or indeed for writing anything), the first being that one hopes to make money, and the second, that that is the play one wants to write.”

-”Writing a Local Play,” Farmer’s Weekly, 26 Aug., 1938

“Nothing will induce me to pretend there is anything unpleasant about making a success of one’s books, or about making money from them.”

-Letter to M. Mosley, 18 April, 1937 (Vol. 2)

“Capitalist or Communist, I cannot believe that salvation is to be found in any system which subordinates Man to Economics.”

-Letter to Richard Acland, 17 April, 1940 (Vol. 2)

“We should ask of an enterprise, not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’; of a man, not ‘what does he make?’ but ‘what is his work worth?’; of goods, not can we induce people to buy them?’ but ‘are they useful things well made?’; of employment, not ‘how much a week?’ but ‘will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?’ And shareholders in - let us say - brewing companies, would astonish the directorate by arising at the shareholders’ meetings and demanding to know, not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly, and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: ‘What goes into the beer?’”

-”Why Work?” 1942

“In the event of a German occupation of this country, which is possible, though I think not probable, be careful not to advertise your connection with me; writers of my sort will not be popular with the Gestapo.”

-Letter to John, her son, 23 June, 1940 (Vol. 2)

“I never remember the details of any book when I have only read it once, which is why I find a library subscription so unsatisfying.”

-Letter to Charles Williams, 16-17 August, 1944 (Vol.3)

“…recommending at random, I may merely put the young person off some masterpiece for ever, by wishing it on them at an unsuitable moment.

What they need to be taught is how to read, and how to follow up their reading. Not to skim through lists of other people’s choices all anywho, but having found an author or a subject which interests them, to pursue that interest till it opens up the whole connected and articulated structure of literature; as it will do if it is followed for its own sake and not because one says so.” - Letter to John Hadfield, 18 April 1945 (Vol. 3)

“Here, however, are four cardinal rules for the reading of great literature: 1) Find out what the writer is actually saying. 2) Be ready to believe that he means what he says. 3) Read consecutively. 4) Practice humility.”

-Letter to Wilson Midgely, 14 Feb., 1951 (Vol. 3)

“Pockets seem to be one of those obvious things, like upholstery, which our ancestors took a surprisingly long time to invent. You would think that nothing was simpler than to take a nice piece of stuffing, and nail it firmly to a wooden plank and sit on it. But no! Hard chairs, hard benches, hard stools, mitigated by moveable ‘guysshyns’ are the rule till somewhere about the 17th century, when it occurred so [sic] somebody to assemble the two things and drive in a few tacks.”

-Letter to Barbara Reynolds, 5 Jan., 1955 (Vol. 4)

'“[The Church] has driven out the poets and prophets, trampled beauty underfoot, and set her face like a mule against knowledge; she has consecrated stupidity and enthroned sentimentality, which is the stupidity of the heart.”

-”The Fest of St. Verb,” 1940

“To the dead Master of the Affirmations, Charles Williams.”

-Dedication to Sayers’s translation of Hell and Purgatory , 1949 and 1955

“Charles Williams had that wonderful gift of making everything came alive. Nothin was ever the same, when once he had touched it. . .All periods and places were equally present to him, and equally sacred and significant - not only ancient palaces or simple villages, but even modern suburbs or industrial cities. He as a wonderful person to talk to, because nothing for him was ever insignificant or dull…”

-Letter to John Sinclair, 16 Sept. 1949 (Vol. 3)

“Words are like drugs of addiction. If the dose is continually repeated, it loses effect, or becomes a mere irritant.”

-“Words I am Weary of” Strand Magazine, May 1943

“The expected word has no power to stimulate: it produces only stupor, if it does not lead to nausea or vulgar jeers.”

-“Words I am Weary of” Strand Magazine, May 1943