Postmodern agenda: the peep show is the art form; the voyeur is the protagonist; the goal is excitement from a safe distance; the ...alibi is that it's all ironic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great Christian drama of the Passion cannot be tragic because the perfection of Jesus eliminates hybris or any shortcoming, ne...ither pity nor terror in Aristotle's sense is possible because of our inability to identify our own flawed human nature with the image of perfect goodness suffering absolute injustice, and the final victory is always certain. Drama with a human protagonist, insofar as it is Christian, cannot be tragic, since the issue has been settled once and for all by the victory of Jesus in His Incarnation, and His Atonement makes all subsequent private atonement unnecessary for the Christian, who needs only some combination of Faith and Grace to participate in the antecedent act. Dante properly recognized this in identifying his great poetic drama as a divine comedy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then th...ere are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gonzo journalism ... is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any ki...nd of journalism--and the best journalists have always known this.... True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it--or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life ... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfini...shed business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could fore...tell achievement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said ... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was t...hat their secret?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ibsen is like this room where we are sitting, with all the tables and chairs. Do I care whether you have twenty or twenty-five lin...ks on your chain? Hedda Gabler, Nora and the rest: it is not that I want! I want Rome and the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Athens; I want beauty, and the flame of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »