If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professio...nal readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I- Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotabl...e stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Very roughly, the drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion; what... is left is theater. Drama is immensely durable; after a thousand critical disputes, it is still there, undiminished, ready for the next wranglers. Theater is magical and evanescent; examine it closely and it turns into tricks of lighting, or the grace of a particular gesture, or the tone of a voice--and these are not its substance, but the rubbish that is left when magic has departed. Theater is the response, the echo, which drama awakens within us when we see it on the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He types his laboured column--weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn:... Spare, editor, to condemn These dry leaves of his autumn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence ...love may spring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat.... It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit--a twenty-second best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »