Kipling Quotes

• From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Views, Genius

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.1012, Wordsworth Editions

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• Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fall, Passing Away, Tin

  H. L. Mencken (1917). “A Book of Prefaces”

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• The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

  Roald Dahl

  Reading, Book, People

  Roald Dahl (2007). “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator”, p.160, Penguin

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• As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.

  Joe R. Lansdale

  Kids, Scott Fitzgerald, Rays

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Girl, Fall, Believe

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.94, Vintage

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• Elephants are my favourite creatures and have been since I was a boy and my mother read Kipling's The Elephant's Child to me. It was loving elephants so much that made we want to write my own story with an elephant at the centre and its bond with a child.

  Michael Morpurgo

  Mother, Children, Writing

  Source: www.altblackpool.co.uk

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• Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

  Richard Louv

  Reading, Book, Rivers

  Richard Louv (2013). “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, p.133, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: 'Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.'

  Halford Luccock

  Men, Years, Who Cares

  Halford Edward Luccock (1956). “Unfinished Business: Short Diversions on Religious Themes”

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• Growing up, I didn't have any comic books, at all. But my friend had a trunk full of them, so comic books were like candy for me. I would go over to his house for a sleep-over, and I would just be devouring everything I could get my hands on. I knew the sleep-over was going to be over, and I was going to go back to my house and it was going to be Kipling.

  James Spader

  Growing Up, Book, Sleep

  Source: collider.com

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• A Time For Prayer "In times of war and not before, God and the soldier we adore. But in times of peace and all things righted, God is forgotten and the soldier slighted." -Rudyard Kipling

  Rudyard Kipling

  Prayer, War, Soldier

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• The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

  George Orwell

  Water, Poetry, Literature

  The Road toWigan Pier ch. 11 (1937)

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• It may be that there is an afterlife and I'll look incredibly stupid, but at least I will have had a crammed pre afterlife, a crammed life, so to me the most important thing is you know as Kipling put it. [...] To fill every unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run.

  Stephen Fry

  Running, Distance, Stupid

  "The Importance of Unbelief". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

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• During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

  George Orwell

  Art, Generations, Nine

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.177, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Will there never come a season Which shall rid us from the curse? Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered From the clash of magazines, And the inkstand shall be shivered Into countless smithereens: When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore: When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards Ride no more.

  James Kenneth Stephen

  Boys, World, Eccentric

  James Kenneth Stephen, “To R. K.”

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• One of the problems with NPR is that there is so much political correctness that if you've got a name that looks like it was made up by Rudyard Kipling, you've got a better chance of getting hired. I'm a white guy named Tony Snow for heaven's sake. That's as white as it goes.

  Tony Snow

  Names, Npr, White

  "You Can Quote Them on That, Maybe" by Al Kamen, www.washingtonpost.com. July 7, 2006.

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• An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then - hoisting onto its back a new world-figure - feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.

  Randall Jarrell

  Mistake, Tired, Intelligent

  "A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables" by Randall Jarrell, (pp. 116-117), 1962.

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• Kipling said that Success and Failure are both imposters, and we should all listen to Kipling, if only because none of us are likely to know anybody else named Rudyard. But having been bitten in my life by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.

  Rupert Holmes

  Ice Cream, Victory And Defeat, Add

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• One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

  Michael Ende

  Children, Doors, Numbers

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• Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

  George Orwell

  Imperialism

  "All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays".

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• When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

  Rose Tremain

  Dream, Writing, Data

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by Rose Tremain, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

  Debbie Macomber

  Children, Wall, Names

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• I was never a great reader, but there were two stories I loved best: Kipling's The Elephant's Child and The Jungle Book. Deep down, I've always wanted to write a book about a wild child and an elephant.

  Michael Morpurgo

  Children, Book, Writing

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• Attention spans are changing. It's very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won't be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don't know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters.

  Cressida Cowell

  Children, Book, Reading

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• Kipling: Where's your sense of humor? Rebis: We're working on reconstructing it.

  Grant Morrison

  Sense Of Humor, Reconstructing

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• I have asked a lot of my emotions-one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Creativity, Blood, Tears

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.2978, e-artnow

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