Quotes

The good life, in classical, medieval and oriental philosophies, is not a life in which we are guaranteed happy feelings, but one in which we “have reason to be happy”—one, that is, where our circumstances are such that we are in tune with our environment and have liberty in that environment consistent with the sort of beings we are.

We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes. We observe that the behaviour of people, of crowds, of history, obeys such recurrent patterns. We hear that trumpets destroyed the walls of Jericho , we recognize that a magical thing called music can come from men in white ties and tails, blowing, waving, thumping and scraping away. Despite the absurd means that produce it, through the con­crete in music we recognize the abstract, we understand that ordinary men and their clumsy instruments are transformed by an art of possession. We may make a personality cult of the conductor, but we are aware that he is not really making the music, it is making him—if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

In a Donald Duck story, Scrooge McDuck fires his old butler, and asks Gyro Gearloose to build him a new, Robotic Butler instead, believing it would be more reliable, as well as less expensive. Gyro initially delivers, but Scrooge keeps making demands for expanded features, demanding that the robot — like his old butler — be able to talk, and provide insightful commentary on day-to-day matters. Gyro is stumped, but the problem gets solved when he runs across the old, laid-off butler, who wants nothing more than to get his job back. Final solution: Gyro disguises the butler as a new robot, and the “rental and service fee” for the robot is just about the same as the butler’s old salary… the butler gets his job back, and Scrooge thinks he has an infallible robot.

The initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.

Surrealism is threatening, however, and it is interesting to note that when the Marxes moved to MGM, who were after bigger audiences and more accessible comedy, Harpo’s “magic powers” were scaled back. So while in Horse Feathers (Paramount, 1932), he accedes to the request to “cut the cards” by producing an axe from a hidden pocket and severing the pack in two, by the time of A Night At The Opera (MGM, 1935), although he still uses an axe to slice a salami, now it is lying handily on a barrel instead of being secreted mysteriously about his person.

Mrs. Nacca always said that an unwritten thought is an incomplete thought. I add that an unpublished text is an incomplete text. When I have an idea, the only way I can be finished with it is to put it in front of its audience. I never worry whether they’ll be interested – that’s up to them. I answer to the idea, not to its audience.

Football, I am told, is like marriage: you have to cleve only to one team, forsaking all others. You have to pretend that Bristol Rovers are always and in all respects better than Bristol City. In extreme cases, you might be expected to try to physically maim City fans.

I don’t think that poems and songs and books are like that. I think that you make a contract to believe in a particular story-world while the singer is creating it, but that you are fully empowered to put it away an inhabit a different world when the next singer, or the next song, begins. I believe in Steve Knightley’s angry, radicalized England while I’m in it; but I also believe in Martin Carthy’s gentle old England and Bellowhead’s radical subversion of it. In the right mood, I can lustily join in with both Land of Hope and Glory and Imagine. I find Mr Chris Wood’s Come Down Jehovah deeply moving, although I don’t agree with it (or at least, I don’t think it means what he thinks it means).

But “agreeing” with a song seems like a category mistake, like trying to determine if the jelly in the trifle logically entails the choclate sprinklies.