What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.
I was once asked: ‘Are you an Islamophobe?’ And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you.
You shun your spirit,′ he murmured, ’every time you agree to sell your days to the city, to measure out your life at the city’s pace.
I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God’s best jokes.
If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we’re all addicted and we can’t break the habit now. There’s not even anything very twentieth century about it, except the disposition. You just can’t kick it, that junk, even if you want to. You can’t get the money monkey off your back.
Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner. I.
And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all about us. Astrology said that the stars were all about me.
The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.
Films are all luck and anarchy.
It’s a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it.
I was informed by my viscera that now was the time to put my arm around her shoulders. I ignored them.
Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence.
When we enter the arctic labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far more fiendishly prolonged.
Terror, perhaps, is always a confession of illegitimacy.
The sun was looking down on this, but not quite sincerely.
Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.
John Updike once argued that although fiction can withstand any amount of egocentricity, it is wholly allergic to narcissism.
America is sick about health: America, where strokes and heart attacks come with a price tag, and where the doctors carry on like slum landlords or war profiteers. And Americans admire it – this triage of the wallet.
Aged seventy-three, he had just finished a book on the King’s English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.
Suffering doesn’t concern itself with the scale of other sufferings. It has no community sense. It isn’t relative, is it.
Women can die gently -... -. Men always die in torment. Why? Towards the end, men break the habit of a lifetime, and start blaming themselves, with full male severity. Women break a habit too, and start blaming themselves no longer. They forgive.