I was asked to-night why I refuse to have truck with intellectuals after business hours. But of course I won't. 1. I am not an int...ellectual. Two minutes' talk with Aldous Huxley, William Glock, or any of the New Statesman crowd would expose me utterly. 2. I am too tired after my day's work to man the intellectual palisade. 3. When my work is finished I want to eat, drink, smoke, and relax. 4. I don't know very much, but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in cur...ious possibilities. I mean the advertisement.... It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For Jeremy, direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things as...sumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of a book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate... in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fou...rth-class love-stories for the spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The inno...cence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »