All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external worl...d by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hallie: Ranse, do you think I could, I, I mean, grown up and all? Do you think I could learn to read? Ranse: Why sure you can..., Hallie. Why, there's nothing to it. It'd be, it'd be easy. Can you learn how to read? Why, I, I can teach you. A smart girl like you. Of course you can learn how to read. Now you wanna try? Hallie, I'll teach ya how. In no time you'll be reading everything. Hallie: It's awful worrisome not knowin' how. I know the good book from preacher talk. But it'd be a sole comfort if I could read the words for myself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It will be the mistake of your life if you go into print in your own defence [sic]. Your denial will reach a new set of people and... start them to talking, while the ones who read the original charges will never see the refutation of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, "Did you get an erection?" I...f the answer is "Yes" from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is indolence ... indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to t...ake the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without both...ering to read the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have very lately read the Prince of Abyssinia [Samuel Johnson's Rasselas]MI am almost equally charmed and shocked at it--the sty...le, the sentiments are inimitable--but the subject is dreadful--and, handled as it is by Dr. Johnson, might make any young, perhaps old, person tremble--O heavens! how dreadful, how terrible it is to be told by a man of his genius and knowledge, in so affectingly probable a manner, that true, real happiness is ever unattainable in this world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »