The Last Word

Friday, April 8, 2005

There's an envy to Tom Wolfe's usual run of detractors, of course, but something more than envy—a resentment, an ache, a fury: If I could write like that, a small cat snarls inside each of their heads, I'd ... I'd change things in this rabid, racist, right-wing world. I'd zola the rich bastards until they burbled for mercy. I'd dickens the corporate polluters until they drowned themselves in their own sick sludge. I'd thackeray, I'd balzac, I'd dostoyevsky everyone who doesn't get it—it, IT, the ineffable IT of political conscience, the mystical rightness that lets a Princeton professor be a revolutionary and, well, a Princeton professor at the same time. God—or Charles Darwin, maybe, or some freak of perverse genetics—put a sword in Tom Wolfe's hands, and the oblivious creep won't use it to smite the ungodly. The man doesn't deserve his sentences. Prose belongs to us, by divine right and right of conquest. And here comes this white-suited fake dandy, this reporter, to set up camp right in the middle of it, like John Ashcroft—or Gary Bauer or, I don't know, Elmer Gantry—buying the prettiest summer house on Martha's Vineyard.
—Joseph Bottum

Wolfe is always showing us something we haven't quite noticed. But after three thick novels and a novella (surely he will never write a short story), the issue remains: Why does a writer whose ambitions are so fundamentally journalistic insist on processing his reportage into fiction?
—Jacob Weisberg

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
—C. Northcote Parkinson

Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas.
—Lord Acton

Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.
—Ecclesiastes

If it had not been for the men and women who, in the past, have had the moral courage to go to jail, we would still be in the jungles.
—Eugene V. Debs

This modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy≠—that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.
—V�clav Havel

Progress ... is the slow and painful ascent of the blind led by the one-eyed.
—Russell Kirk

This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that hold not be indulged in lightly. There are few people alive with whom I care to pray, sleep, dance, sing, or share my bread and wine. Of course there are times when this latter cannot be avoided if we are to exist socially, but it is endurable only because it need not be the only fashion of self-nourishment.
—M. F. K. Fisher

Rhetoric is not an art but an artless practice. As the Spartan said, there is no genuine art of speaking without a grasp of truth, and there never will be.
—Socrates

Basically we have nothing in common. He is a man of intellect, but of very common intellect; my association with him is no more entertaining than if I were to read a well-written book.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One of the best things about being a writer is when you're having the wildest time, when you're completely on the bum, you're still working, or you at least you should be.
—Ernest Hemingway

Sometimes I wish I'd went through those good times stone cold sober so I could remember everything, but then again, if I had been sober the times probably wouldn't have been worth remembering.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
—G. W. F. Hegel

Everything I do is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
—W.C. Fields

The Last Word

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