Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes peo...ple were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy car tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and ...lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a televion set.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat w...ith a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of mainta...ining the professional standing of the critic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence ...that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. Th...e best of us start from scratch with every new book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrim...onious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch o...f a soft buck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »