Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into... account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to "realize" myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to ha...ve "succeeded" this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is "realizable." Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual... needs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I had any doubts at all about the justice of my dislike for Shakespeare, that doubt vanished completely. What a crude, immoral,... vulgar, and senseless work Hamlet is. The whole thing is based on pagan vengeance; the only aim is to gather together as many effects as possible; there is no rhyme or reason about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for the... eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Putting people in a room and strapping wires to their wrist to find out if I make them tingle when I'm telling them about Beirut i...s a long way from Edward R. Murrow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alicia Huberman: Look, I'll make it easy for you. The time has come when you must tell me that you have a wife and two adorable ch...ildren, and this madness between us can't go on any longer. T.R. Devlin: I bet you've heard that line often enough. Alicia: Right below the belt every time. Oh that isn't fair, Dev. Devlin: Skip it. We have other things to talk about. We have a job.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Captain Prescott: I don't like this. I don't like her coming here. Mr. Beardsley: She's had me worried for some time, a woman... of that sort. T.R. Devlin: What sort is that, Mr. Beardsley? Mr. Beardsley: I don't think any of us have any illusions about her character, have we Devlin? Devlin: Not at all. Not in the slightest. Miss Huberman is first, last, and always not a lady. She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn't hold a candle to your wife, sir, sitting in Washington playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »