Authors: David Pratt

The Impossible Takes Longer (10 page)

BOOK: The Impossible Takes Longer

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To the governing body of Queen's College, Oxford, of which he was provost

540. My old Cambridge friend, T. R. Glover, used to tell me that there were three ways of being unpopular in Cambridge. One was to be known outside Cambridge. Another was to know something about a subject other than that which you had taken in your degree

examination. And the third was to be able to write simple English which anybody could understand.

Edward Appleton
PHYSICS, 1947

541. This is the first time we have elected an art historian to a fellowship, and I very much hope it will also be the last.

J. J. Thomson
PHYSICS, 1906

As master of Trinity College, Cambridge, introducing the art historian and subsequendy unmasked traitor Anthony Blunt

542 The rivalry between Yale and Harvard is quite as keen as that between Cambridge and Oxford and shows itself in more unconventional ways. I saw at the house of one of the professors [at Yale] a dog who had been trained to pretend to be sick whenever he heard the name Harvard.

J. J. Thomson
PHYSICS, 1906

543. Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.

Toni Morrison
LITERATURE, 1993

544. When we spliced the profit gene into academic culture, we created a new organism—the recombinant university. We reprogrammed the incentives that guide science. The rule in academe used to be "publish or perish." Now bioscientists have an alternative—"patent and profit."

Paul Berg
CHEMISTRY, 1980

545. There are no politics that are as dirty as academic politics.

Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976

546. The disputes are so bitter because the stakes are so small.

Henry Kissinger
PEACE, 1973

On university politics

547. A professor whose hands do not shake by the end of the academic year has not performed his duties properly.

Allvar Gullstrand
MEDICINE, 1911

Arts and Culture

Although most of the quotations in this section are from Literature laureates, this group has no monopoly on interest in the arts. Several science laureates were talented musicians, some of them performing at the symphony level. The writer Gao Xingjian exhibits his paintings internationally; Harold Kroto chose chemistry as a career over graphic arts; the chemist Roald Hoffmann is a widely published poet.

It is difficult to find a Nobel Prize winner in any field who was not also a gifted writer. Their Nobel lectures are eloquent. Most laureates also write their autobiographies for the Nobel archive; these documents can be found in the Nobel Museum (http://nobelprize.org). It is the rare prize winner who has not published at least a handful of books, and the average output of Literature laureates is about three dozen volumes. Winston Churchill published forty books, Pearl S. Buck published over eighty, and Bertrand Russell's bibliography runs to over four thousand items.

THE ARTS AND ARTISTS

548. Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace.

Hermann Hesse
LITERATURE, 1946

549. That life is worth living is the essential message and assurance of all art.

Hermann Hesse
LITERATURE, 1946

550. Art is always a good hiding-place, not for dynamite, but for intellectual explosives and social time bombs.

Heinrich Boll
LITERATURE, 1972

551. Art is a recoilless weapon.

Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987

552. A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957

553. There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.

Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957

554. Art is unthinkable without risk and self-sacrifice.

Boris Pasternak
LITERATURE, 1958

555. To admire an artist, you should not know him personally.

Jacinto Benavente
LITERATURE, 1922

556. Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, is lost.

André Gide
LITERATURE, 1947

557. It is the artist's job to create sunshine when there is none.

Romain Rolland
LITERATURE, 1915

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

558. Literature is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

Thomas Mann
LITERATURE, 1929

559. As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine.

Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987

560. Literature is a science one has to learn and there are 10,000 years standing behind every short story that gets written.

Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez
LITERATURE, 1982

561. Literature is hazardously and irreversibly my life, my death and my suffering, my vocation and my servitude, my constant yearning and my well-merited consolation.

Camilo José Cela
LITERATURE, 1989

562. Even if one day people stop or are forced to stop writing and publishing, if books are no longer available, there will still be storytellers giving us mouth-to-ear artificial respiration, spinning old stories in new ways: loud and soft, heckling and halting, now close to laughter, now on the brink of tears.

Gilnter Grass
LITERATURE, 1999

563. A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images.

Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957

564. There is something similar about all stories, but I still don't know what it is.

Elias Canetti
LITERATURE, 1981

565. Words are all we have.

Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 196 9

566. Short words are best and old words when short are best of all.

Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953

WRITERS AND WRITING

567. When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978

568. To the question always asked, "Why do you write?" the response of the poet will always be the briefest "In order to live better."

Saint-John Perse
LITERATURE, i960

569. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949

570. All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954

571. If you write novels merely to entertain—then burn them! . . . Just consider how many writers there have been who—down the ages—have written novels to entertain! And who remembers them now?

Miguel Ángel Asturias
LITERATURE, 1967

572. Pushed out of sight in any writer, no matter how austere a front he presents to others, is the desire for someone to read what he has written.

William Golding
LITERATuRE, 198 3

573. Getting published isn't the important thing. You write in order to be able to breathe.

Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969

574. A man's writing is himself. A kind man writes kindly. A mean man writes meanly. A sick man writes sickly. And a wise man writes wisely.

John Steinbeck
LITERATURE, 1962

575. Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going . . . I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954

576. If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

Naguib Mahfouz
LITERATURE, 198 8

577. I couldn't have done it otherwise, gone on, I mean. I could not have gone on through the awful wretchedness of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969

578. The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949

579. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954

580. Writing, at its best, is a lonely life . . . He does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954

581. The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

John Steinbeck
LITERATURE, 1962

582. When the writer becomes the center of his attention he becomes a nudnik. And a nudnik who believes he's profound is even worse than just a plain nudnik.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978

583. Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators.

Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957

584. For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiendy explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.

Orhan Pamuk
LITERATURE, 2006

585. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949

586. When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

Sinclair Lewis
LITERATURE, 1930

587. When it comes to reading galley proofs, I always feel reminded of an awful sight once seen in a prisoner-of-war camp: a man slowly and deliberately eating his own vomit.

Konrad Lorenz
MEDICINE, 1973

588. If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978

589. I have always believed in fierce, devoted apprenticeship . . . Originality is the obsession of ambitious talent. Contemptible from early on and insufferable in the young.

Derek Walcott
LITERATURE, 1992