The Last Word

By Clive James | Tuesday, April 24, 2007

I find that any self-respecting artist must be, and in more than one sense of the term, an émigré.
—Witold Gombrowicz

Mankind in the Christian era possesses one huge advantage over the ancients: a bad conscience.
—Egon Friedell

Why should I waste my imagination on myself?
—Sergei Diaghilev

“There is no man, however wise,” he said to me, “who has not, at some time in his youth, said things, or even led a life, of which his memory is disagreeable and which he would wish to be abolished. But he absolutely should not regret it, because he can’t be assured of becoming a sage—to the extent that that is possible—without having passed through all the ridiculous or odious incarnations that must precede the final incarnation.”
—Marcel Proust

Too many milieux injure an adaptable sensibility. There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.
—Jean Cocteau

Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops.
—Coco Chanel

Since Stalingrad, even the smallest military success has been denied us. On the other hand, our political chances have hugely increased, as you know.

—Josef Goebbels

If it wasn’t for me, I would do brilliantly.
—Chamfort

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes.
—Albert Camus

I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems.
—Heinrich Heine

There is no surer sign of a great writer than when whole books could be made out of his passing remarks.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Communist interpretation is never wrong. Logicians will object in vain that a theory which exempts itself from all refutations escapes from the order of truth.
—Raymond Aron

There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that’s already three things, and there are a lot more.
—Peter Altenberg

We acted as though we had tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of evidence.
—Jean-François Revel

The scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics, and atheists.
—Czeslaw Milosz

An epic is a sublimated boredom.
—Thomas Mann

A liberated woman is a fish that has fought its way to shore.
—Karl Kraus

What is the use of being moral in a night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam?
—William Hazlitt

Abel, if he had fled from the murderous attentions of his brother Cain, would as an emigrant have had to put up with an even more bitter inconvenience. He would have had to wander the world for the rest of his life with the brand of Abel on his forehead.
—Alfred Polgar

All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.
—Dr. Johnson

The Last Word

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