Great Throughts Treasury

"The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed."

"A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale."

"Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) 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 or America."

"All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory."

"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."

"Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical problem hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required."

"How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit."

"I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10."

"I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it. It seemed to me that people were living a sort of small sermon that they believed in, but at the same time it was a fairy tale. Selfish desires, along with one or two highly suspect elevated thoughts. They secretly regard themselves as works of art, valuable in themselves."

"I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30."

"It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?"

"It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened."

"It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues."

"In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth."

"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."

"Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough."

"Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere."

"It's all in the art. You get no credit for living."

"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."

"It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening."

"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."

"On short stories: something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing."

"The American Civil War was the first modern war. It is true that the Crimean War, some eight years earlier, has resemblances with the American conflict. There is the awakening of public concern for the care of casualties, a concern which had grown with medical knowledge. But the Crimean War was fought in a small area. It was fought by professional soldiers--the British commander-in-chief directed operations from his private yacht to which he returned to dine and sleep every night--and the casualties, though heavy, were than half of those suffered in America, where a million men died in the field, the hospitals and the prison camps. The Civil War involved everyone, the armies became conscript armies almost at once. The professional soldiers were put to the task of training the man in the street."

"London landladies are Britannias armed with helmet, shield, trident, and have faces with the word 'No' stamped like a coat of arms on them."

"Mass society destroys the things it is told are its inheritance. It is rarely possible to see the Abbey without being surrounded by thousands of tourists from all over the world. Like St. Peter's at Rome, it has been turned into a sinister sort of railway terminal. The aisles are as crowded as the pavements of Oxford Street or the alleys of a large shop, imagination is jostled, awe dispersed, and the mind never at rest. All great things, in our time, can only be seen in fragments, by fragmentary people."

"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."

"One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential."

"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."

"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."

"Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity, it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be."

"The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive."

"The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview."

"The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting. [Of London]"

"The difference between farce and humor in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humor varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths."

"The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on."

"The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and buys curtains, carpets and hangings from the draper, the information takes on something from the theme of the novel itself: the material is a symbol of the exotic, and the exotic feeds the Romantic appetite. It will lead to satiety, bankruptcy and eventually to nihilism and the final drive towards death and nothingness."

"The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth concatenations of life."

"The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony."

"The State, that craving rookery of committees and subcommittees."

"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool."

"There is nothing like a coup de foudre and absorption in family responsibility for maturing the male and pulling his scattered wits together."

"The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it."

"The only serious rival to Pepys is Boswell, but Boswell is a snail without a shell. He trails through life unhoused and exclamatory, whereas Pepys is housed and sotto voce. Boswell is confessional before anything else, whereas, though he too tells all, Pepys is not; he records for the sensual pleasure of record. Boswell adores his damned soul to the point of tears and is in shame, ramshackle pursuit of father-figures who will offer salvation. Unlike Pepys, he has above all a conceit of his own peculiar genius. Pepys has no notion of genius. Where Pepys is an eager careerist, struck by the wonder of it, Boswell has no career; he has only a carousel, and it is odd that the careerist has a more genuine sense of pleasure than the Calvinist libertine."

"The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers."

"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."

"To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal."

"We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness."

"There is more magic in sin if it is not committed."

"Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere."

"We live by our genius for hope; we survive by our talent for dispensing with it."