We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
George SteinerThe ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George SteinerI have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
George SteinerI 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.
George SteinerThe violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.
George SteinerNothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.
George Steiner