The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the lang...uage he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader's eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in ev...ery army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.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 »
Have at last written another [play, i.e., Endgame].... Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to... claw, more inhuman than "Godot."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our... nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is ...no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rick: You played it for her, you can play it for me. Sam: Well, I don't think I can remember it.... Rick: If she can stand it, I can. Play it!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »