What is the main thing in love? to know and to hide. To know about the one you love and to hide that you love. At times the hiding... (shame) overpowers the knowing (passion). The passion for the hidden--the passion for the revealed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For one who lived among enemies so long: If often he was wrong and at times absurd,... To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Watt's need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a wom...an hats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An actor must communicate his author's given message--comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confr...onted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows o...ne big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classifica tion, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have you never been moved by poor men's fidelity, the image of you they form in their simple minds? Why should you always talk of ...their envy, without understanding that what they ask of you is not so much your worldly goods, as something very hard to define, which they themselves can put no name to; yet at times it consoles their loneliness; a dream of splendor, of magnificence, a tawdry dream, a poor man's dream--and yet God blesses it!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at tim...es strangely wills and works for itself.... If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"I'm sure you've often wished there was an after-life." Of course I had, I told him. Everybody has that wish at times. But that ha...d no more importance than wishing to be rich, or to swim very fast, or to have a better-shaped mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »