You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they’re forty.
This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.
Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks.
His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.
I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don’t believe the free market has a mind.
She wasn’t just beautiful. She was like the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had just remembered something funny.
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Men never sound more stupid than when they’re telling you they’re a very complex personality.
If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.
Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides.
Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.
The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant.
And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew.
The childish urge to understand everything doesn’t necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.
We are often told that the next generation of literati won’t have private libraries: everything will be in the computer. It’s a rational solution, but that’s probably what’s wrong with it. Being book crazy is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all.
Why should I waste my imagination on myself? – SERGEI DIAGHILEV.
As the late Edward W Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, ‘Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.’ I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can’t be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized.