What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past--the whole life of a civilization--but also a major share of ...the Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: f...irst the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of t...he so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the Ovarian Theory of Literature, or, rather, its complement, the Testicular Theory. A recent camp follower ... of this explic...it theory is ... Norman Mailer, who has attributed his own gift, and the literary gift in general, solely and directly to the possession of a specific pair of organs. One writes with these organs, Mailer has said ... and I have always wondered with what shade of ink he manages to do it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to mak...e poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illum...inations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said--the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »