“There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless.”
“The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”
“I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.”
“If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.”
“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.”
“As God is my witness, I ll never be hungry again.”
“It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.”
“I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: Oh, Hermann.... It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe.”
“Everyone makes mistakes, but only a few could forgive. Padahal ada banyak kesalahan yang hanya perlu dimaafkan, bukan dihukum. An eye for an eye will make us all blind.”
“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.”
“Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam | She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed”
“The Postmodernists tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.”
“Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”
“Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962”
“To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all. ”
“يقال أحيانا أن الإنسان حيوان كاسر إلا أن فى هذا القول إهانة للحيوانات لا داعى لها فالحيوانات لا تبلغ مبلغ البشر فى القسوة أبداً وهى لا تتفنن فى قسوتها تفنن الإنسان”
“I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.”