It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another ... if a man is ...a scientist, like me, he'll always say "Publish and be damned."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature must become Party literature.... Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature mu...st become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I ...owe everything to this.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the g...race of other men's genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are... resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical ...era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races.... The economics of t...his musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »