I went to a British Council event a while back and there were lots of German professors of literature. About half of them were convinced I had a German sense of humour and the other half were sure it was British. They are probably still arguing about it now.
If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.
I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.
I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.
To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.
That idea of escapism. . . these words could sum up my life.
Right is its own defense.
Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.
Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.
I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.
Every man is his own hell.
It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.
In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.
The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.
I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised.
If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
My education and background thoroughly inform my writing
History develops, art stands still.