13 quotes
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest and most complete expression of the English language.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are possessed of a classical education and a private income. It is Ciceronian English.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.
Enemies of Promise (1938)
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.
Enemies of Promise (1938)