People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that’s the way people think. I don’t think people think in essays; it’s one exclamation point to another.
The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it’s an example of freedom from religion.
I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I’m a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.
And – of course! – the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren’t qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.
Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
The first newspaper I worked on was the ‘Springfield Union’ in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no’s.
If you label it this, then it can’t be that.
Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.
An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.
I make out a schoolbus... glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.
Art is a creed, not a craft.
What was it – this implacable remoteness, this inability to surrender herself to the warmth and comradely feelings of others? Could being an academic star, being applauded over and over again as a prodigy, take the place of all that? She shuddered with a feeling she couldn’t have put a name to. It was the congenital human fear of isolation.
It is a rule, to which there has never been an exception, that when an actor or a television performer rises up to the microphone at one of these awards ceremonies and expresses moral indignation over something, he illustrates Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that ’moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.
If you become indignant, this elevates you to the plane of “intellectual.
That flag is a symbol we attach our emotions to, but it isn’t the emotion itself and it isn’t the thing we really care about. Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
The only thing that had truly stuck in Sherman’s mind about Christopher Marlowe, after nine years at Buckley, four years at St. Paul’s, and four years at Yale, was that you were, in fact, supposed to know who Christopher Marlowe was.
A persistent case of the bingos was enough to wash a man out of night carrier landings. That did not mean you were finished as a Navy pilot. It merely meant that you were finished so far as carrier ops were concerned, which meant that you were finished so far as combat was concerned, which meant you were no longer in the competition, no longer ascending the pyramid, no longer qualified for the company of those with the right stuff.
To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.
The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and moon came out – and the sun shone at the same time. He had reached a layer of the upper atmosphere where the air was too thin to contain reflecting dust particles.