“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”
“Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.”
“There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.”
“People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.”
“I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.”
“I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.”
“I must give up seeing people, I told myself.”
“Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?”
“Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.”
“But don’t think that it’s a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It’s our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it’s cold outside. But it’s not the cold’s fault that it’s cold.”
“In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort.”
“Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.”
“A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.”
“It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.”
“The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.”
“...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...”
“The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.”
“To begin with, I hate these new-fangled intermediate meals. Why can't people eat enough at luncheon to last till dinner?”
“No matter how good you think you are
or how clever... How many fancy new friends
you make on the telly... The reality of footballing life is this:
The chairman is the boss, then comes the directors...
Then the secretary, then the fans, then the players...
And then finally, last of all... bottom of the heap,
the lowest of the low... comes the one, who in the end, we can all do without...
The fucking manager.”
“...he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course, any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.”
“Ona vrsta usamljenosti u kojoj moraš da se boriš kako bi prihvatio situacju iz korena je drugačija od one vrste u kojoj znaš da ćeš isplivati samo ako izdržiš.”
“When you’ve completed the book or article or at the end of a meeting, write down the three (or so) main points.”
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