"What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers"
About this Quote
Logan Pearsall Smith is staking out a theory of reading that treats literature less like a delivery system for messages and more like a field of insinuations. The “says” is the author’s declared content: arguments, plots, morals, the stuff that can be summarized at a dinner party. The “whispers” are everything that resists summary: tone, withheld judgments, tiny hesitations, a slant of irony, the pressure of what’s left unsaid. Smith’s line flatters the attentive reader, too. If the real value is in the whisper, then good reading becomes a kind of eavesdropping, an intimate act that rewards sensitivity over certainty.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to didactic writing. It’s not anti-idea; it’s anti-broadcast. Smith is suspicious of prose that arrives with its conclusions already stapled on. A “good author” in his sense trusts implication, the way a sentence can carry its own shadow. The whisper is also where an author’s contradictions live: the private anxieties beneath public confidence, the bias that slips through even when the argument is disciplined. That’s why the line still feels contemporary in an era of hot takes and slogan-ready “themes.” We’re surrounded by speech; we’re starved for nuance.
Context matters: Smith, an essayist and aphorist in the early 20th-century Anglo-American tradition, wrote in a culture that prized manners, understatement, and the art of the indirect. His sentence performs what it praises: it doesn’t lecture about technique; it murmurs a preference, then lets you hear the rest.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to didactic writing. It’s not anti-idea; it’s anti-broadcast. Smith is suspicious of prose that arrives with its conclusions already stapled on. A “good author” in his sense trusts implication, the way a sentence can carry its own shadow. The whisper is also where an author’s contradictions live: the private anxieties beneath public confidence, the bias that slips through even when the argument is disciplined. That’s why the line still feels contemporary in an era of hot takes and slogan-ready “themes.” We’re surrounded by speech; we’re starved for nuance.
Context matters: Smith, an essayist and aphorist in the early 20th-century Anglo-American tradition, wrote in a culture that prized manners, understatement, and the art of the indirect. His sentence performs what it praises: it doesn’t lecture about technique; it murmurs a preference, then lets you hear the rest.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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