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 »
Grovelling, intimate words,... heart-stealing flattery, a tight embrace of my thinner-than-thin body, violent kisses all over-- obviously, getting angry is worth the risk, but even still, I'm not interested. My lover is dear to my heart, so how could I be like that on purpose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I didn't consider intellectuals intelligent, I never liked them or their thoughts about life. I defined them as people who care... nothing for argument, who are interested only in information; or as people who have a preference for learning things rather than experiencing them. They have opinions but no point of view.... Their talk is the gloomiest type of human discourse I know.... This is a red flag to my nature. Intellectuals, to me have no natures ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How can anyone be interested in war?--that glorious pursuit of annihilation with its ceremonious bellowings and trumpetings over t...he mangling of human bones and muscles and organs and eyes, its inconceivable agonies which could have been prevented by a few well- chosen, reasonable words. How, why, did this unnecessary business begin? Why does anyone want to read about it--this redundant human madness which men accept as inevitable?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what... from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not ei...ther vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is w...eak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of e...xistence paralyzes me... To be alive is so incredible that all I can do is to lie still and merely breathe--like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »