7 quotes
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)