Storm Jameson Quotes
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One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.
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a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.
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Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.
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Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.
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The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.
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Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.
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There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.
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Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.
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giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.
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In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.
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No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.
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When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.
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Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited.
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... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.
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War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.
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No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.
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Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.
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Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.
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Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.
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If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.
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Language is memory and metaphor.
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A joke is a joke or the image of a truth.
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... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.
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I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.
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Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.
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The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.
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Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.
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My mind is not suited to go much into company.
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She did not so much cook as assassinate food.
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The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?
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