93 quotes
The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can't tolerate having strong men around him.
North Face of Soho (2006)
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Glued to the Box (1983)
Beyond a certain point - and that point is reached early - precision is what expressiveness depends on.
One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
If it feels like a mistake before you go in, don't go in.
North Face of Soho (2006)
The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.
May Week Was in June (1990)
A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.
Unreliable Memoirs (1980)
His poetry, so wonderful when it is really flying, isn’t trying to tell you how much he knows. It’s giving thanks for how much there is to be known.
Shakespeare, far from being careless about grammar, could depart from it in any direction only because he had first mastered it as a structure.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Glued to the Box (1983)
People don't get their morality from their reading matter: they bring their morality to it.
Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.
Pedants and snobs are fond of declaring that only accomplished French speakers can catch Proust's tone. That might be so, but the tone is only one of the things to be caught.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
The question isn't about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Beethoven. The question is about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Mozart.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
Glued to the Box (1983)
If the assembled company rags you for a failing, you can usually play up to it for comic effect: it's the failing they don't mention that you have to watch out for.
North Face of Soho (2006)
Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.
Unreliable Memoirs (1980)
The professor was a bore on a Guggenheim, a long-range drone, and international ballistic fossil. I spent the whole hour drawing little pictures of hanged men.
May Week Was in June (1990)
Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home.
Unreliable Memoirs (1980)