Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass-you don't see it, but somehow it does something.

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass - you don't see it, but somehow it does something.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Every orientation presupposes a disorientation.

People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear