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George Steiner Biography

Francis George Steiner, FBA (born April 23, 1929) is a French-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. He has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust. An article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath", saying that he is either "often credited with recasting the role of the critic", or a "pretentious namedropper" whose "range comes at the price of inaccuracy" and "complacency".

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George Steiner Quotes

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

Colourless, Judge, Judging, Mean, Right, Writing

If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.

Anger, Art, Dream, Laughter, Mozart, Polis

Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.

Lasts, Night, Privacy, Take, Vital

More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.

Altogether, Boom, Cities, Debt, Income, Live

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

Citing, Classic, Hole, Modern, Pages

The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.

Clarity, Felt, Heart, Indwelling, Musical, Text

To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.

Cities, European, Praxis, Statements, Trying

Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.

Genius, Human, Littles, May, Mental, Pastimes

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

Decipher, Hear, Significance, Translate, Understand

Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.

Said, Written, Consequence

Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.

Moving, Self, Weakness, Move, Craftsman

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

Culture, Gregariousness, Inebriated, Noise, Wrong

To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.

Art, Arts, Esoteric, Music, Skills

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Book, Hands, Human, Intellectual, Reading

Functions of technical information, historic record, analytic argument, which are integral and obvious to Dante's use of verse are now almost completely a part of the 'prosaic'.

Information, Part, Poetry, Records, Use, Verse

Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.

Incessant, Life, Network, Proceeds, Signals

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Brought, Concentric, Fashion, Life, Music, Ripples

The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.

Art, Comic, Drama, Forever, Tragic

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

Believe, Central, Hate, Human, People, Use

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Deal, Larger, Reality, Segment, Silence, Special

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