I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in cur...ious possibilities. I mean the advertisement.... It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For Jeremy, direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things as...sumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of a book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate... in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fou...rth-class love-stories for the spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The inno...cence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama ...begins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most lovers ... picture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. T...hey are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discove...ry to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under... a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet--the scientific poet--of a new mythology.... Each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant.... They compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million school-teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »