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The JUST Book Reviews growing collection of select quotations
"A
book is like a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an
apostle to look out." "The
difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is
unreadable and literature is not read." "To
tell about a drunken muzhik's beating his wife is incomparably harder
than to compose a whole tract about the 'woman question.'" "When
one is polite in German, one lies." "Satires
which the censor can understand are justly forbidden." "Literary
criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced
upon the critic by the book he is criticising." "We
can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by
trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that
we were paying the author an undeserved compliment." "In
most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal
to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us
nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then
interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art
manageable, comfortable." "The
awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and
the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man." "Life
must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards." "Love
is space and time made directly perceptible to the heart." "It is very
difficult to write like a madman, but it is a very easy matter to write
like a fool." "My
definition of a philosopher is of a man up in a balloon, with his family
and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to
haul him down."
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