Storm Jameson Quotes

... the whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.

invaders always destroy libraries.

An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.

Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things. ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

Mere human beings cant afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?

Hope is a talent like any other.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.

the sex even in serious pornography has less singularity than the mating of squirrels.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.

There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.

Language is memory and metaphor.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?

War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.