Quotes
Quotes about Man
So a useless truth obtrudes on to a most ravishing lie. I would say finally that, as the earth turns and the truth of summer and the lie of winter interchange, so the bulky ball of history revolves, and what a man dies for may become the thing that dies for him.
Music deals in sound without clear referents. Music is multiguous,since it is capable of many interpretations. Music, one might say, is Hopkinsian.
People are very queer, really. If a man's a professor, for instance, they always think he's going to be ugly and untidy and bald and absent-minded, and I don't see any reason why that should be true
Manhatten's an island, really, and it can't move outwards, so to speak, so it's got to move up instead.
I'm not doing the real work of a real human being; I'm just stringing words together
An old man's lust is not pleasant
But the real age, as we are always being told, is an effect of the mind. It is manifested chiefly in lack of interest in life
Music is a purer art (than literature) because it has no direct relationship to human events. It is totally outside the field of moral judgment
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be elsewhere
Humanity is unregenerable and hates the language of conformity, since conformity has a whiff of the inhuman about it
Everything we've experienced on earth seems to point toward the permanence of pain
It is the godlike task of the novelist to create human beings whom we accept as living creatures filled with complexities and armed with ´free will
It is not enough for a novelist to fabricate a human soul; there must be a body as well, an an immediate space-time continuum for that body to rest or move in
It is not enough for a novelist to fabricate a human soul; there must be a body as well, and an immediate space-time continuum for that body to rest or move in
Novels are about the human condition, which is not easy, and how, if possible, to cope with it
The difference between the so-called art novel and the popular variety is perhaps that in the first the human beings are more important than the action and in the second it is the other way about
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
The novelist siphons his inner life into the work he has already published; his outer life may be summed up in the image of a man at a desk
I am proud to be Mancunian
Animals will take love without demanding it; they have teeth, but they will not bite with the vindictiveness of human adults
Stories about human adults would have been frightening, for human adults were irrational, gross, demanding.
Manchester was generous, and London was not
Anthony Burgess A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults. The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
No man can read everything and I discuss no author I have not read
He (Kafka) was a pilot of the pain of contemporary man
