Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve – or to corrupt – civilization, and are obliged to use them.
Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.
To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.
Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?
No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.
Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn’t learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?
The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.
Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.
From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.
A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.
I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind...
If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.
Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are – gentleness, memory, and habit.
Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings – many of them abortive.
The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.
Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses...
A joke is a joke or the image of a truth...
Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.
The hunger of the spirit for eternity – as fierce as a starving man’s for bread – is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.
Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.
Mere human beings cant afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.