Storm Jameson Quotes - Page 3

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.

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.

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

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

Truth is the only good and the purest pity. ... Men lie for profit or for pity. All lies turn to poison, but a lie that is told for pity or shame breeds such a host of ills that no power on earth can compass their redemption.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

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.

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.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

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.

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.

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

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

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

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.

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

Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

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

each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.