It’s a letdown if the comedian doesn’t finally actually really sit on his hat.
Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the war, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.
We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.
I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig’s milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root.
How wrong people always were when they said: ‘It’s better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.’ No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I’d sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.
Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.
It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunds of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity.
Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.
A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
For the first time he really felt that it was no use trying to save those who fundamentally would rather not be saved.
It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.
No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.
For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand’s work unfavorably.
I don’t allow people of your sort to stand in my way. That’s what you’re leaving out of account. I’m having Christine because it’s my right. Do you understand that? If I’m after something, I don’t care what I do to make sure that I get it. That’s the only law I abide by; it’s the only was to get things in this world... With me you just haven’t a hope in hell.
Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Why couldn’t every single one of them without exception whatsoever just go right away from where he was and leave him alone?
Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.