Great Throughts Treasury

"But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push. Those forces ? incomparably the most potent in our culture ? have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go."

"By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo."

"By 12.30, Giles had consumed five gin-rickies, four gin-and-tonics, three gin-and-its, two gin-and-bitters, and one gin."

"But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while."

"By the time Philip and I went to live with Kingsley and Jane, I was a semiliterate truant and waster whose main interest was hanging around in betting shops (where, tellingly, my speciality was reversible forecasts on the dogs)."

"Character is destiny"

"Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams."

"Consider the Jewish joke, with the old lady running distractedly along the seashore: Help! My son the doctor is drowning. Amusing, I suppose. Her pride, I suppose, is amusing: it is greater than her love."

"Denunciation in Russia has a long history, going back at least as far as the sixteenth century and the testingly protracted reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533? 84). Spy or die was, more or less, the oath you swore. This practice, increasingly institutionalized under the old regime, was a tsarist barbarity that Lenin might have been expected to question."

"Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not."

"Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything."

"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?"

"Dickens is a much misunderstood and mis-approached writer, in that he tends to be read, particularly in the twentieth century, as a social commentator - like the great Victorians, a realist in his way. But he isn't at all like that. His genre is actually more like a fairy tale - weird transformations, long voyages from which people come back altered, parental mysteries, semi-magical twists."

"Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block."

"Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers."

"Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move."

"Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road."

"Einstein's Monsters, by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now."

"Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism."

"Erections, as we all know, come to the teenager on a plate."

"Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards."

"Esprit de l'escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you'd said, wishing you'd done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom."

"Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit."

"Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal."

"Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient."

"Everything seems fine until you?re about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, ?While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it?s a funny thing, but I?m an exception to that rule.?"

"Exploitative is the key word here. It suggests that while you are free to be as sexually miserable as you like, the moment you exchange hard cash for a copy of Playboy, you are in the pornography perpetuation business, and your misery becomes political."

"Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing."

"For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect ? not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We?re back where we started. To you, nothing ? from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much."

"For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound."

"Feminists have often claimed a moral equivalence for sexual and racial prejudice. There are certain affinities and one or two of these affinities are mildly and paradoxically encouraging. Sexism is like racism: we all feel such impulses. Our parents feel them more strongly than we feel them; our children, we trust, will feel them less strongly than we feel them. People don't change or improve much, but they do evolve. It is very slow."

"Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life"

"Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader."

"For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future."

"For the survivors and their testimonies I want to single out from the huge and forbidding archive a volume that deserves permanent currency: Anton Gill?s The Journey Back from Hell. It is an extraordinarily inspiring treasury of voices, and one grounded and marshalled by the author with both flair and decorum. Indeed, these reminiscences, these dramatic monologues, reshape our tentative answer to the unavoidable question: What did you have to have to survive? What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency (the people who had no tenets to live by?of whatever nature?generally succumbed no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasized by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck."

"Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time."

"He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed."

"Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon."

"He could take one look at me- at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel- he could take one look at me and be pretty sure i ran on heavy fuel."

"Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life."

"Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do ? like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy."

"He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged."

"He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched. Come on: we don?t do that. Except when we?re pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake with our fake faces. He grinned. No He didn?t. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you?d better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch. She laughed. No she didn?t. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones. He smiled. Not quite true. All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All that no good to write."

"He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction."

"He turns the pages from right to left. He begins at the beginning and ends at the end. This makes a quirky sense to me?but Mikio and I are definitely in the minority here. And how can we two be right? It would make so many others wrong. Water moves upward. It seeks the highest level. What did you expect? Smoke falls. Things are created in the violence of fire. But that?s all right. Gravity still pins us to the planet."

"He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles."

"Heat, money, sex and fever -this is it, this is New York, this is first class; this is the sharp end."

"Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with [literary fiction]."

"Her body is probably naked by now but there is nothing as naked as human eyes: they haven't even got skin over them."

"He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness."