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Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts QUOTES

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts QUOTES

101 " Today, they separately demonstrate what a luxury it is to be a stable, prosperous, democratic nation with a dependable constitution. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

102 " Australia is all that and more, and Argentina, after yet another implosion of the civil order, is once again none of it and less. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

103 " It is isn’t easy to make someone who hasn’t experienced it understand what it feels like, this martyrdom of being judged, devalued, disqualified, and misrepresented by journalists writing in haste who are bored by reading and who, for that matter, hardly ever read anything anyway. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

104 " Ezra Pound famously said that culture begins when you forget what book that came from. Unfortunately he himself never forgot any citation that suited his mania, and his work as a totality is hopelessly vitiated by the half-witted diligence of the trainspotter. An edifying comparison can be made with Yeats, whose allegiance to the spiritualist claptrap of the theory of the Mystic Rose was at least as batty as Pound’s to the pseudo-economic quackery of the theory of Social Credit: but Yeats could develop beyond his early lyrics because art, for him, was a system of solid knowledge by far transcending his own fads. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

105 " Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty—it makes them indispensable— "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

106 " Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

107 " Her novels, which I have not yet read, are usually described as the work of a writer’s writer, or perhaps of someone who has been to the Institute for the Theory of Literature in Zagreb. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

108 " He committed suicide in 1794 because the Revolutionary authorities had made it clear that they planned to reward his irreverent wit with a visit to the guillotine. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

109 " Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he’s doing.) "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

110 " he saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

111 " when virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

112 " The more nobly behaved the family, the less chance it stood. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

113 " Tacitus, “qui abrégeoit tout parce qu’il voyoit tout.” (“He abridged everything because he saw everything.” Perfect.) "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

114 " ideology itself the perpetual enemy of realism. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

115 " fraternité: “Be my brother or I will kill you. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

116 " its author’s enviable knack for assessing the significance of what everybody else had already seen and his congenital propensity for inflating the results into a speculative rigmarole that nobody else would ever think or could even follow. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

117 " That, in fact, was the joke that killed him: he was arrested soon after making "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

118 " There is no crueller tyranny,” said Montesquieu, “than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

119 " role of Amidala, Queen of Naboo, the Bad Hair Planet, "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

120 " the central character in the first all-zombie production of Turandot. "

― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts