Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of themselves.
Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.
Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.
It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.
Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can’t read Pushkin in Russian, you’re really missing something.
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.
Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn’t much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.
When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was ’cause I was a snob.
Writers quite often starve. And I’m mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that’s a formula for starvation.
I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.
Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that’s more interesting than the early one.
Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
My niece is – her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.
In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder’s labourer could eat like a king – rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.