A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.
The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.
If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.
The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.
From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.
Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.
the sex even in serious pornography has less singularity than the mating of squirrels.
each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.
An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.
Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things. ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?
... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.
Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.
Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.
jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.
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