The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country’s failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
Pound had argued – and Eliot had helped him prove – that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.
Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can’t decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
The secret for an artist is to make that a subject and not bang your head against the wall and give up. But to turn it into and treat the new subject matter, which is one’s own vanishing.
If we want a book to do more than what it does, that’s a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that’s an endorsement.
Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.
In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald’s, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.
There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.
Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual – a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly – is that you can see this desire in perspective.
Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
Writing is a performance art for me. They’re very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I’m a writer, not a performer.
Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.
A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn’t.