A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
There seemed nothing to do but live.
Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That’s what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.
Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.
The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
I said to myself, ‘If you don’t sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?’
If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.
We are not by nature cruel.
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.