Storm Jameson Quotes

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.

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

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

From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.

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 ...

The hunger of the spirit for eternity - as fierce as a starving man's for bread - is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.

A writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.

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

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.

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

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.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past ...

Hope is a talent like any other.

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

We do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

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.

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

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

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

Language is memory and metaphor.

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

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?

The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.

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

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses ...

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

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.

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.

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

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.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas
on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor
unless he means something else, quite different
is a rogue ...

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.

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

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

The truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

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.

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.

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?

Giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.

The stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

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

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

As often as not our whole self ... engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things.

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

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

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

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

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

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.