Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, an...d disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit to imitate the sayers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because of the enormous size of the public, television advertisers face problems of a different nature to advertisers in the press... or even on posters. The readers of even the most widely circulated newspapers represent only a relatively small section of the population, and quite a number of facts have been accumulated about the interests, prejudices and habits of the readers of different papers; posters are placed in definite localities and the population of that locality, in contrast to other localities in that area, and of the different regions of England can, if necessary, be estimated. But with television, all these sensational calculations disappear; the advertiser is reaching practically the whole population within range of the transmitter. He may well ignore the poorest people, because they are not likely to have a set, and the richest and best educated because (as Dorothy Sayers shrewdly pointed out) they "buy what they want when they want it" and are not likely to be influenced by mass advertisements; but between those two extremes he has to try to please and portray Everyman and Everywoman and, above all, must try to offend none of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the ...truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Except ye become as little children," except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and ...interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever more... closely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers--if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Celt is quarrelsome; he prides himself that with him it is a word and a blow. He broods upon the memory of ancient wrongs in a... way that to the Englishman is incomprehensible; if the English were Irish by temperament they would still be roused to fury by the name of the Battle of Hastings, instead of summing it up philosophically as "1066 and all that."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »