Novelists From England

"Morality is of the surface. But also the values that decide whether a person is ridiculous or free from absurdity are pure conventions of a society, they exist only in a surface-world, of two dimensions."

"I should invent very little if I were a flatterer. […] I should just encourage people to describe themselves, and use the description they seemed most to relish."

"Society is a defensive organization against the incalculable. It is so constituted as to exclude and to banish anything, or any person, likely to disturb its repose, to rout its pretensions, wound its vanity, or to demand energy or a new effort, which it is determined not to make."

"[T]he world created by Art — Fiction, Drama, Poetry etc. — must be sufficiently removed from the real world so that no character from the one could under any circumstances enter the other (the situation imagined by Pirandello), without the anomaly being apparent at once."

"I am not in agreement with the current belief in a strained 'impersonality' as the secret of artistic success. Nor can I see the sense of pretending — as it must be a pretence, and a thin one, too — that in my account to you of what I have seen I can be impartial and omniscient. That would be in the nature of a bluff or a blasphemy. There can only be one judge and I am not he.I am not a judge but a party. All I can claim is that my cause is not an idle one — that I appeal less to passion than to reason."

"Being born in a stable does not make you a horse. But living in a studio produces in some persons a feeling that they should dabble and daub a little."

"The second cause (and this applies to a much smaller number of such people — only indeed, to the very cream and élite of them) is that some (born with a happy or unhappy knack not possessed by their less talented fellows) produce a little art themselves — more than the inconsequent daubing and dabbing we have noticed, but less than the 'real thing'. And with this class you come to the Ape of God proper. For with these unwanted and unnecessary labours, and the amour-propre associated with their results, envy steps in. The complication of their malevolence that ensues is curious to watch. But it redoubles, in the natural course of things, the fervour of their caprice or ill-will to the 'professional' activities of the effective artist — that rare man born for an exacting intellectual task, and devoting his life unsparingly to it."

"Yet it is true that in our democratic society flattery does take the form of saying to people that they are like other people — rather than unlike or possessing something peculiarly their own. And the personal advantages that are chosen to flatter them about are those that they share with great crowds of other people."

"By adopting the life of the artist the rich have not learnt more about art, and they respect it less. With their more irresponsible 'bohemian' life they have left behind their 'responsibilities' — a little culture among the rest. Indeed they are almost as crudely ignorant as is the traditional painter. Besides — living in cafés, studios and 'artistic' flats — they are all 'artists' in a sense themselves. They have made the great discovery that every one wielding a brush or pen is not a 'genius', any more than they are. But they have absorbed a good deal of the envy of those who are not 'geniuses' for those who are (having in a sense placed themselves upon the same level) — and the contempt of those who are, for those who are not. The result is that they abominate good art as much as bad artists do, and have as much contempt for bad art as have good artists! There is more indifference to and often hatred of every form of art in these pseudo-artistic circles — in the studios, in short, now mostly occupied by them — than in all the rest of the world put together."

"I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass. “The architectural simplicity” – whether of a platonic idea or greek temple – I far prefer to no idea at all, or no temple at all, or, for instance, to most of the complicated and too tropical structures of India. Nothing could ever convince my EYE – even if my intelligence were otherwise overcome – that anything that did not possess this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion, was the greatest art. Bergson is indeed the arch enemy of every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring a concrete world. Bergson is the enemy of the Eye, from the start; though he might arrive at some emotional compromise with the Ear. But I can hardly imagine any way in which he is not against every form of intelligent life. (p. 338)"

"The modern man whether of Bloomsbury Baltimore or Berlin has vanquished vanity — he offers himself to his own inspection as the worm he turns out to be. If he is vain at all, and it must be conceded that self-love is hard to kill, it is about his humility. His own Vernichtung is his greatest pride the laying bare of the nullity, the Nichtigkeit, that is the 'self' at the heart of energy (which is merely the doctrine of Xt that 'he who humbleth himself shall be exalted' ! Be modest, protest you are nobody, a biological bagatelle and hi presto! you will get top-marks, and be given authority, that is the idea — it is the christian strategy. …)"

"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse."

"The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time. (p. 336)"

"The self-feeling bears no relation, amongst quite normal men and women, to physical fact. The nature of their particular physique, is not that the last thing of which they think? Look, an intensely ill-favoured woman she will frequently behave as if she were very attractive. No one is surprised — for they in their turn are they not beauties too? stunted puny men, to turn to men, do they not possess the assurance of a champion athlete? Well then, all these people have the assurance of being what they are not: whatever happens, a something more favourable than the facts isn't it! This is the rule of the normal average."

"[I]f within a decade and a half you massacre ten million people in war and another ten million in civil war, it is not easy after that to return to a morality that regards it as wrong to pocket a salt-spoon."

"The puritanic potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of "decency". The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to."

"The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government."

"The novelty of any time enables people to pretend that they are existing in the state of society that in fact they have superseded. (It is an old political expedient to pretend to be what you have destroyed.) They will pretend that their abuses are old abuses and that only their reforms are new."

"The prime essential in the solution of the "Jewish problem" is to eradicate entirely from our minds all prejudice and superstition about the Jew."

"The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe."

"Great Britain is certainly suspect to Americans. They cannot make head or tail of her. She is a stuck-up old girl who owes a lot of money - an odd thing for such a highly respectable old lady to do. She is rather flighty, which is alarming in one so old - she never seems quite serious, that is - goes into giggles all of a sudden, or smiles enigmatically, if politely. She seems to the average American slightly phoney. Let us face up to that. She has many habits which baffle and put one on one's guard - the curious way she has of speaking English with a foreign accent, for instance. Then she must be the most quarrelsome old dame which ever stepped: always - umbrella in hand - getting into scraps with her neighbours, and spitting at them over the garden wall."

"Is it with us a compensatory fact that, being more stupid in the mass, we shoot up higher, when we do shoot up, in dazzling concentrations of intellectual power and so produce what we describe as "genius"? For "genius" is with us an individual thing. Whereas all Jews are little geniuses."

"Wherever there is objective truth there is satire."

"The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact."

"I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo."

"We have the immense background of War and of Revolution. That is enough — the blood is gratis! Both the soldier and the communist enrol themselves to murder — one under militarist rules, the other under marxist disciplines. But both are homicide-clubs, you call your victim "Hun", you call him "Bourgeois", it is all one — no, wars and communes have cheapened murder."

"You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism."

"1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph. 2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously. 3. Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind. 4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion. 5. Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away. 6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight. 7. Laughter is the female of Tragedy. 8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies. 9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist. 10. Laughter is the mind sneezing. 11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic. 12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable."

"Certainly Mr Eliot in the twenties was responsible for a great vogue for verse-satire. An ideal formula of ironic, gently "satiric", self-expression was provided by that master for the undergraduate underworld, tired and thirsty for poetic fame in a small way. The results of Mr Eliot are not Mr Eliot himself: but satire with him has been the painted smile of the clown. Habits of expression ensuing from mannerism are, as a fact, remote from the central function of satire. In its essence the purpose of satire — whether verse or prose — is aggression. (When whimsical, sentimental, or "poetic" it is a sort of bastard humour.) Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory."

"It could perhaps be asserted, even, that the greatest Satire cannot be moralistic at all: if for no other reason, because no mind of the first order has ever itself been taken in, nor consented to take in others, by the crude injunctions of any purely moral code."

"Who ran to help me when I fell, And would some pretty story tell, Or kiss the place to make it well? My mother."

"I love little pussy, her coat is so warm; And if I don't hurt her she'll do me no harm."

"When someone asks me, "Do you speak Breton or Inuktitut?" I say, "Not yet.""

"Are we not children, all of us?"

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are, Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky!"

"My relationship with scientists has changed. Now, they consider me more of a peer than a guinea pig, and I'm part of the scientific discussion."

"'It must be nice to think there is a true reality,' says Miss Callendar. 'I've always found reality a matter of great debate.'"

"My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers — to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response — for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead."

"I thank the goodness and the grace Which on my birth have smiled, And made me in these Christian days, A happy English child."

"I had eventually come to understand that friendship was a delicate, gradual process that mustn't be rushed or seized upon but allowed and encouraged to take its course over time. I pictured it as a butterfly, simultaneously beautiful and fragile, that once afloat belonged to the air and any attempt to grab at it would only destroy it."

"'Look, Felicity,' says Howard, 'there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires.'"

"'All action leads to suffering, someone else's, or one's own.'"

"'The trouble is, it's hard to know you're little,' says Felicity. 'People like to make themselves matter.'"

"'Oh, everybody exploits somebody,' says Howard, 'in this social order it's part of the human lot.'"

"'I think, George,' says Merion, ' the trouble is that you don't have a conflict model of society.'"

"Jochum had said, "You keep asking the universe 'How ought I to live?' But it can't answer.""

"To you liberals, of course, goats are just sheep from broken homes."

"Though man a thinking being is defined, Few use the grand prerogative of mind. How few think justly of the thinking few! How many never think, who think they do!"

"[A]nd the traffic noise that boomed in through the window was another reminder of what his spirit knew, that he was but a grain of sand in someone else's desert."

"Well, yes, surely I think everybody ought to enjoy life as much as it's humanly possible because that's why we exist. I believe."