In many ways, Twain and Waugh were strikingly similar. Even within the group of great humorists, they belong together. Both anti-e...rotic imaginations, they stress male comradeships and represent love-relationships most conventionally and sentimentally. They both show society as dominated by fools and bores, and fate as characterized by betrayal and disaster--life as subordinate to death. For that reason, no doubt, both are much interested in militarism and the machinery of death, as well as in the military and manly virtues. Both men tell jokes that belong to the bar where magistrates gather, managers, captains, men who take responsibility for law and order. Both were quickly irritated by most real clubs and bars. One might say that both belonged to the same cultural type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the fir...st place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself ...cloddish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilised taste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conv...ersation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dea...d.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in t...he gay intimacy of the slums ... who find prison so soul-destroying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »