I have always been – I think any student of history almost inevitably is – a cheerful pessimist.
Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.
Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.
The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.
It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.
I’ll read, and then I’ll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don’t fight it.
By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.
After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.
It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.
Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying my requirements.
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
The feeble clavichord did not carry far; the harpsichord was only a little stronger; but Cristofori in Italy was working at these defects; he built a machine he called clavicembalo piano e forte – a keyboard instrument to play “soft and loud.” Contrary to all experience, we now call it simply “a soft.
The beloved’s features too were standardized in certain adjectives of color and shape and likened to natural objects, fruit and flowers especially. As a result, ingenuity in finding fresh ways to follow the pattern was required in addition to actual poetic powers. The challenge was great and it accounts for the quantity of verbal lovemaking in the blue, addressed to the remote or non-existent tribes of Celias and Delias.
What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required – no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.