The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation... can help us get out of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. C...ould you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way ...is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... up to this date, I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I h...ave attained to, is the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The event combined with Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the wiser... Usages of age, but it's both there And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight, At the back of the mind, where we live now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed. Girls brought up [as you wer...e,] in a very strait-laced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined. Those are the girls that make bad wives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed de...ep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are two kinds of men, and only two, and that young man is one kind. He is high-minded, he is pure, he's the kind of man that... the world pretends to look up to, and in fact despises. He is the kind of man who breeds unhappiness, particularly in women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All children's books are about ideals. Adult fiction sets out to portray and then explain the world as it really is; books for chi...ldren present it as it should be. Child readers come to them hoping for a certain amount of instruction, but chiefly for stories in which the petty restrictions of ordinary life are removed: they want to encounter people who can fly, geese that lay golden eggs, frogs that turn into princes, spaceships piloted by children, anything that measures up to their ideals of adventure and imagination. Adults, on the other hand, are more likely to want to feed the children a set of moral examples. By all means, let them have their fun, but the opportunity of providing models of ideal behaviour is not to be wasted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »