STORM JAMESON

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Hope is a talent like any other.

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

A joke is a joke or the image of a truth.

Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

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.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

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?

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

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

Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.