93 quotes
Referring to "the historian David Irving" is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller.
The question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it.
As Of This Writing (2003)
Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.
The Crystal Bucket (1982)
Herzen was closer to the truth when he said that every memory calls up a dozen others. The real miracle of Proust is the discipline with which he stemmed the flow. Everything is a Madeleine.
Unreliable Memoirs (1980)
In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Australian TV is so bad it is almost impossible to describe. If you have seen American television and can imagine it without its redeeming features, then Australian TV is even worse than that.
Flying Visits (1984)
As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks...
Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
Glued to the Box (1983)
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Perry [Como] gave his usual impersonation of a man who has simultaneously been told to say 'Cheese' and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow.
The Crystal Bucket (1982)
The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment Hitler came to power.
As Of This Writing (2003)
Santayana was probably wrong when he said that those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. Those who remember are condemned to relive it too.
His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
May Week Was in June (1990)
Speer got quite a lot done in Berlin and if hostilities had not started early he would have transformed it utterly, with consequences far more hideous than anything achieved by the RAF.
Snakecharmers in Texas (1988)
The most solid documentary of the week was White Rhodesia (BBC1), presented by Hugh Burnett. He was on screen only two or three times and even when he was there you would have sworn he wasn't.
The Crystal Bucket (1982)
It's yet another mark of Auden's superiority that whereas his contemporaries could be didactic about what they had merely thought or read, Auden could be tentative about what he felt in his bones.
At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)
All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.
The controls fell easily to hand, and from there onto the floor.
I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me.
Unreliable Memoirs (1980)