Cultural Critics

"Picture a French election circa 2020, 2025: the Islamic Republican Coalition wins the most seats in the National Assembly."

"[On protests against going to war with Iraq] One woman bore a picture of some female genitalia – possibly hers, the provenance was obscure – over the caption 'This Bush Is For Peace.' Another waxed eloquent: 'Trim Bush.' Out in Marin County somewhere, other bushes for peace disrobed, lay down on a hillside, and formed the words 'No War.' I wonder if there are any conflicted nudists, with a bush for Iraq and a rack for Bush."

"[On John Edwards, U.S. Senator from North Carolina] The stump speech of pretty-boy Senator John Edwards, which I've heard often enough to be able to mouth along with him, has room for everything, including vivid, wrenching portraits of despair: 'Tonight somewhere in America a ten-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm.' You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be doubled up in laughter at that line."

"[On Al Gore] The Eco-Messiah sternly talks up the old Nazi comparisons: "what we're facing is an ecological Holocaust, and the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin." That 221,000 kilowatt-hours might suggest that, if this is the ecological Holocaust, Gore's pad is Auschwitz. But, as his spokesperson would no doubt argue, when you're faced with ecological Holocausts and ecological Kristallnachts, sometimes the only way to bring it to an end is with an ecological Hiroshima. The Gore electric bill is the eco-atom bomb: you have to light up the world in order to save it."

"[On the movie Monster] I confess I went into the movie ready to dislike Miss Theron. I'm sick of newspaper articles detailing the amount of time, talent and technical wizardry required to turn some silver-screen beauty into an average-looking woman. There are plenty of average-looking women out there — gritty Britty TV drama seems to be full of them — and it seems excessively unfair that they can't even get a shot at the frumpy roles because Nicole Kidman's hogging the false nose again."

"William Jefferson Clinton was America's entertainer-in-chief. But, like the third hour of It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, no matter how good the show is eventually you've had enough. It wasn't public approval that saved Clinton, but public indifference. By the end, even his sex life bored them. To rise to the presidency from Hot Springs - a town where there's no right side of the tracks - is an amazing feat. To survive in office despite being your own smokin' gun is spectacular."

"Multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon."

"It's not a clash between civilisations but within them - in the Muslim world, between what's left of moderate traditional Islam and an extreme strain of that faith that even many of their co-religionists have difficulty living with; and in the West between those who think this culture is worth defending and those who'd rather sleepwalk to national suicide while mumbling bromides about whether Western hedonism is to blame for 'lack of services for locals' in Bali. To read Robert Frisk and Margo Kingston is like watching a panto cast on drugs: No matter how often the baddies say, 'I'm behind you!', Robert and Margo reply, 'Oh, no, you're not!'"

"There's no fine line between "free speech" and "hate speech": Free speech is hate speech; it's for the speech you hate – and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don't have free speech, then you can't have an honest discussion."

"A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind" question is more urgent than most of us expected. The Western world, as a concept, is dead and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying."

"Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples – not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital. What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. A couple of years ago, the papers reported that stabbings are so rampant in British schoolyards that a company that specializes in military body armor is now manufacturing school blazers lined with Kevlar. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population."

"Europe’s economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis. What is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-nationalist, post-modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can’t make the math add up."

"Our treatment plants will always be ready to receive the literary outpourings emanating from his most humane soil"

"Unlike Llewelyn Morgan, Mark Steyn was hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission there to defend freedom of speech. The reason is that Islamic militants and their Western dupes are attacking free speech everywhere: the former with guns and bombs, the latter with litigation and specious arguments."

"The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds"

"Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their "Don't treat on me" T-shirts and sneer, "The peasants are revolting." You oppose illegal immigration? You're a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamaphobe. If that's the choice, I'd rather be damned as a racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position as a form of mental illness."

"When you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America's animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we've already gone."

"You cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without grave consequences. We are approaching the end of the Anglo-American moment, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world."

"Life is too short, and Proust is too long."

"The novel's outside world, if well enough created, does live on, when you look at the world of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Proust! They're indelible."

"The questions are raised, even with the older questions, like Proust's madeleine, still setting challenges to the sciences."

"We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal."

"here the artist has often set the problem. In tracing the connection between art and science, we see that the flow is as often from art as toward it. Proust is one of the pioneers of the memory, and his problem is only now beginning to be taken up by the psychiatrists and the mathematicians."

"My bed usually looks like Proust’s bed; my whole life is lived there."

"The last novel that I wrote in that way was A Guest of Honour and even then it had elements obviously influenced by my great mentor, Marcel Proust, and many others whose work I read when I was young. But they go unacknowledged because, as someone said, they taught you something and then you forget that they taught it to you and you carry on from there. Indeed, people are rather amazed when I say that I had and continue to have this feeling that I was tremendously influenced, like so many writers, by Proust. My view of the world was changed by him; a film was peeled off my eyes and I understood my life and my own emotions in a way profoundly influenced by him."

"Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth."

"(PB: In some writers the visual imagination doesn’t seem to count for much. But then there is Henry James, or Proust.) NG: Yes, in Proust one sees everything."

"The son of well-to-do parents who … engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. … The real resistance lies elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He … is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game."

"(What's the difference between a spokesman and a witness?) A spokesman assumes that he is speaking for others. I never assumed that I never assumed that I could...No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society. (Are there any white writers you would describe as witnesses?) Dostoyevsky, Dickens, James, Proust."

"You can't imitate Proust."

"Proust's scansions often cross vast distances, and move with an assured step between microcosm and macrocosm. They show him to have been a metaphysical wit possessed of a strong liking for physics, and an 'interdisciplinarist' beyond the dreams of the modern university."

"Par l’art seulement, nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n’est pas le même que le nôtre et dont les paysages nous seraient restés aussi inconnus que ceux qu’il peut y avoir dans la lune. Grâce à l’art, au lieu de voir un seul monde, le nôtre, nous le voyons se multiplier, et autant qu’il y a d’artistes originaux, autant nous avons de mondes à notre disposition, plus différents les uns des autres que ceux qui roulent dans l’infini et qui, bien des siècles après qu’est éteint le foyer dont il émanait, qu’il s’appelât Rembrandt ou Vermeer, nous envoient encore leur rayon spécial.'Ce travail de l’artiste, de chercher à apercevoir sous la matière, sous de l’expérience, sous des mots, quelque chose de différent, c’est exactement le travail inverse de celui que, à chaque minute, quand nous vivons détourné de nous-même, l’amour-propre, la passion, l’intelligence, et l’habitude aussi accomplissent en nous, quand elles amassent au-dessus de nos impressions vraies, pour nous les cacher entièrement, les nomenclatures, les buts pratiques que nous appelons faussement la vie."

"Le bonheur est salutaire pour le corps, mais c'est le chagrin qui développe les forces de l'esprit."

"Quant au bonheur, il n’a presque qu’une seule utilité, rendre le malheur possible."

"Aussi, les demeures disposées des deux côtés du chenal faisaient penser à des sites de la nature, mais d'une nature qui aurait créé ses œvres avec une imagination humaine."

"If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time."

"that writer-snob Marcel Proust"

"L'amour, c'est l'espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur."

"L'adultère introduit l'esprit dans la lettre que bien souvent le mariage eût laissée morte."

"Les liens entre un être et nous n'existent que dans notre pensée. La mémoire en s'affaiblissant les relâche, et, malgré l'illusion dont nous voudrions être dupes et dont, par amour, par amitié, par politesse, par respect humain, par devoir, nous dupons les autres, nous existons seuls. L'homme est l'être qui ne peut sortir de soi, qui ne connaît les autres qu'en soi, et, en disant le contraire, ment."

"Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux, de voir l'univers avec les yeux d'un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d'eux voit, que chacun d'eux est."

"Comme tous les gens qui ne sont pas amoureux, il s'imaginait qu'on choisit la personne qu'on aime après mille délibérations et d'après des qualités et convenances diverses."

"La maladie est le plus écouté des médecins: à la bonté, au savoir on ne fait que promettre; on obéit à la souffrance."

"Nous n'arrivons pas à changer les choses selon notre désir, mais peu à peu notre désir change. La situation que nous espérions changer parce qu'elle nous était insupportable, nous devient indifférente. Nous n'avons pas pu surmonter l'obstacle, comme nous le voulions absolument, mais la vie nous l'a fait tourner, dépasser, et c'est à peine alors si en nous retournant vers le lointain du passé nous pouvons l'apercevoir, tant il est devenu imperceptible."

"Nous désirons passionnément qu'il y ait une autre vie où nous serions pareils à ce que nous sommes ici-bas. Mais nous ne réfléchissons pas que, même sans attendre cette autre vie, dans celle-ci, au bout de quelques années, nous sommes infidèles à ce que nous avons été, à ce que nous voulions rester immortellement."

"On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner."

"[Le bonheur] est, dans l'amour, un état anormal."

"Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d'autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d'œuvre."

"Les traits de notre visage ne sont guère que des gestes devenus, par l'habitude, définitifs."

"Une femme est d'une plus grande utilité pour notre vie si elle y est, au lieu d'un élément de bonheur, un instrument de chagrin, et il n'y en a pas une seule dont la possession soit aussi précieuse que celle des vérités qu'elle nous découvre en nous faisant souffrir."