20 quotes
All great things, in our time, can only be seen in fragments, by fragmentary people.
London Perceived (1962)
Mass society destroys the things it is told are its inheritance.
London Perceived (1962)
Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
Midnight Oil (1971)
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
London Perceived (1962)
One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)
How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
Midnight Oil (1971)
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)
Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)
The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.
The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers (1979)
I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it.
Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.
It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.
This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England...
On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)
Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety.
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)
Yes, well I had all my serious illnesses in late middle age. And now I'm just stuck, I'm afraid.
Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)
Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.
The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers (1979)
In her businesslike way she thought that her life had begun when she was a very young woman and she really did look lovely: you knew it wouldn't last and you packed all you could into it — but men were different. A man like B — like Alfie, too — never got beyond the time when they were boys and, damn them, it kept them young.
On the Edge of the Cliff: Short Stories (1979)
Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)