Great Throughts Treasury

"A sense of humor is a serious business; and it isn't funny, not having one. Watch the humorless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humorless can program themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick ? and that's about it. They are handicapped in the head, or mentally 'challenged', as Americans say (euphemism itself being a denial of humor). The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time, hands down. The humorless have no idea what is going on and can't make sense of anything at all."

"A week after the attack, one is free to taste the bile of its atrocious ingenuity. It is already trite ? but stringently necessary ? to emphasize that such a mise en scŠne would have embarrassed a studio executive's storyboard or a thriller-writer's notebook ("What happened today was not credible," were the wooden words of Tom Clancy, the author of The Sum of All Fears). And yet in broad daylight and full consciousness that outline became established reality: a score or so of Stanley knives produced two million tons of rubble."

"A life is one kind of biography and the letters are another kind of life, but the internal story, the true story is in the Collected Poems. The recent attempts by Motion and others to pass judgement on Larkin look awfully green and pale, compared with the self-examinations of the poetry. They think they judge him? No, he judges them. His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness."

"Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them."

"A writer?s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes? you have to think: ?This novel I am writing is no good.? Then you have to think: ?All my novels are no good.? And then, when you reach that point, you can begin."

"After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship--marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest."

"After just over a year of Jane's tutelage (much of it spent in a last-ditch boarding crammer in Brighton), I had another half-dozen Os (including Latin, from scratch), three As, and a second-tier scholarship to Oxford. None of this would have happened without Jane's energy and determination."

"After many ponderous experiments the first crematorium was opened in December 1920 in Petrograd. It could manage barely 120 bodies a month, and, in February 1921, cremated itself when the wooden roof caught fire."

"After September 11, then, writers faced quantitative change, but not qualitative change. In the following days and weeks, the voices coming from their rooms were very quiet; still, they were individual voices, and playfully rational, all espousing the ideology of no ideology. They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear. "Desolate": "giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness... from L. desolat-, desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'.""

"After. In the Preface to Volume Three he is less severe, and more persuasive: the Communist regime survived not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West. Among the elements of the state?s strength was its capacity to astonish, to dumbfound?and thus to delude. As Conquest says, the reality of Stalin?s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable . His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable."

"All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer."

"All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction."

"All US presidents ? and all US presidential candidates ? have to be religious or have to pretend to be religious. More specifically, they have to subscribe to "born again" Christianity. Bush, with his semi-compulsory prayer-breakfasts and so on, isn't pretending to be religious... We hear about the successful "Texanisation" of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?"

"All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory."

"All publicity isn't good publicity. As a New York publicist put it: "What: the guy's an asshole so I'll go and buy his novel?""

"America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was."

"All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say."

"America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions."

"Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming -his one tragic flaw."

"Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist."

"America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere."

"America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short."

"And I still surfed on Manhattan static."

"And I felt next to nothing as I walked to the village; I paid my respects to the countryside yet was unable to detect solemn sympathy in its quiet or reproach in its stillness. Usually that road brought me miles of footage from the past: the bright-faced ten-year-old running for the Oxford bus; the lardy pubescent, out on soul-rambles (i.e. sulks), or off for a wank in the woods; the youth, handsomely reading Tennyson on summer evenings, or trying to kill birds with feeble, rusted slug-guns, or behind the hedge smoking fags with Geoffrey, then hawking in the ditch. But now I strode it vacantly, my childhood nowhere to be found."

"And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit."

"And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe lights of nightlife long ago."

"And then there's the information that comes in the night."

"And there was something that frightened me much more. If I went to the doctor's tomorrow, and was cured by, say, the weekend, there'd be no relief from anxiety, just different anxiety. Even as the antibiotics hosed down my genitals, the mind's bacteria would be forming new armies. I'd come up with something to get me down... Was this the case with everyone -- everyone, that is, who wasn't already a thalidomide baked-bean, or a gangrenous imbecile, or degradingly poor, or irretrievably ugly, and would therefore have pretty obvious targets for their worries? If so, the notion of 'having problems' -- or 'having a harder life than most people', or 'having a harder life than you usually had' -- was spurious. You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change."

"And quite right too. Thinking back, actually, 'self-infatuation' strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn't so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I'm sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think: 'Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I've got a soft spot for old Charles. He's all right is Charlie. Chuck's ... okay."

"And while Trish stared - stared, as it now seemed, into her own eyes - Guy held her hand and watched the crowd: how it bled color from the enormous room and drew all energy towards itself, forming one triumphal being; how it trembled, then burst or came or died, releasing individuality; and how the champion was borne along on its subsidence, his back slapped, his hair tousled, mimed by female hands and laughing, like the god of mobs."

"As elsewhere in his writing, Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda."

"Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time."

"Are snoopers snooping on their own pain? Probably."

"As it turns out, Mailer comes close to solving the mystery [of Lee Harvey Oswald], but he never establishes the tragedy. Dreiser's tale was tragic and American because it happened every day. Oswald made only one notch in the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently."

"As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes. So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that anymore?"

"As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess."

"As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia."

"At the age of twenty, his artistic dreams frustrated, Hitler was a tramp: park benches, soup queues. Given just a little more talent, perhaps, he would have killed himself, not in the bunker, but in a cozy little studio in Klagenfurt."

"As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.)"

"At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution."

"'Beautifully written . . . the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven . . . contains writing of which our best writers would be proud . . . there is not a singly ugly or dead sentence . . .' - or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences - unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as 'Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler' or 'Eric Pickford answered' or 'Pazzi worked like a man possessed' or 'Margot laughed in spite of herself' or 'Bob Sneed broke the silence.' What these commentators must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us to a dying fall: 'Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself...' 'It seemed forever ago...' 'He looked deep, deep into her eyes...' 'His dark eyes held her whole...' Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose."

"Beauty, extreme yet ambiguously available; this very roughly, was what Nicola's entrance to the Black Cross had said to Keith. But he didn't know the nature -- he didn't know the brand -- of the availability."

"Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being."

"Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture."

"Being photographed was dead time for the soul. Can the head think, while it does the same half smile under the same light frown? If this was all true, then Richard's soul was in great shape. No one photographed him anymore, not even his wife. When the photographs came back from an increasingly infrequent holiday. Richard was never there? an elbow or earlobe on the edge of the frame, on the edge of life and love.."

"Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here."

"Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands."

"Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun."

"Bujak spoke of Einstein as if he were God's literary critic, God being a poet. I, more stolidly, tend to suspect that God is a novelist ? a garrulous and deeply unwholesome one too."

"Bly is a poet, he is a big cat, so to speak, and not some chipmunk from the how-to culture. But it is the how-to culture that has picked up on his book. ? And yet, for a while Iron John transformed male consciousness in the United States. The wild men weekends and initiation, adventure holidays and whatnot, which were big business, may prove to be ephemeral. But what does one make of the unabashed references in the press to "men's liberation" and the men's movement and the fact that there are now at least half a dozen magazines devoted to nothing else? Changing men, journeymen, man. ? Bly's average reader is not a poet and a critic, but a weightlifter from Brooklyn."