83 quotes
And here's a marvelous one, quoted from Sonia by Stephen Spender. "Auschwitz, oh, dear no! That person was never in Auschwitz. Only in some very minor death camp." The ultimate in English snobbery.
A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)
[I]n science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)
[I]t is a mistake to think that an intellectual is required to be intelligent; there are occasions when the terms seem to be almost antonyms.
How I Grew (1987)
Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that — how to express this — you really must make the self.
The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)
Loyalty to a side, he said, had been instilled in him by his southern mother, but he now thought you had to be loyal to all sides, to the truth as you saw it, which, when you came down to it, meant being loyal to yourself.
What disturbed the advocates of the dances most profoundly was the discovery of a fathomless paradox at the bottom of their friends' thinking: in following the crowd, against their own will and judgment, they were following themselves, i.e., nobody.
The Groves of Academe (1952)
Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, eh mamma mia? If you start an argument with yourself, that makes two people at least, and when you have two people, one of them starts appeasing the other.
Birds of America (1971)
"I learned long ago," she stoutly reiterated, "that one can't bargain in these affairs. If one wants to be effective, one hands in one's resignation and clears out. There's no other way for a man or an institution to learn that one is serious than to learn it too late."
The Groves of Academe (1952)
[T]he whole concept of transcendence […] was very close to my heart, the concept that man is more than his circumstances, more even than himself.
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)
The Florentines, who were incapable of ruling themselves, produced a great theorist of government: Machiavelli. The Venetians had no theorists and evolved a model Republic.
Venice Observed (1956)
St Mary of Egypt […] has, by the way, two qualifications for being a Venetian saint — first, she was a courtesan, and, second, when she died, her remains were buried by a pious lion.
Venice Observed (1956)
As happens with sports and hobbies, his enjoyment was solemnized by expertise, the rites of comparing, collating, a half-deliberate parody of scholarship like the recitation of batting averages.
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970)
The Venetians invented the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, anonymous denunciations (the Bocca del Leone), the gambling casino, and the Ghetto.
Venice Observed (1956)
You know what my favourite quotation is? […] It’s from Chaucer […] Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."
The Company She Keeps (1942)
[Y]ou're so darned liberal that you're sort of perverse.
Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)
He would only come if she were unprepared. Or would he come only if she were prepared? With her lamp trimmed like the wise virgins? Christianity would tell her to buy food for two, but the pagans would say, 'Don't risk it.'
The Group (1963)
Of all the men I slept with in my studio-bed on Gay Street (and there were a lot: I stopped counting) I liked Bill Mangold the best. Until I began to see Philip Rahv.
Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992)