Storm Jameson Quotes & Sayings

Jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first. — Storm Jameson

To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself. — Storm Jameson

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth ... — Storm Jameson

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

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise. — Storm Jameson

Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity. — Storm Jameson

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind ... — Storm Jameson

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it. — Storm Jameson

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. — Storm Jameson

Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious. — Storm Jameson

Hope is a talent like any other. — Storm Jameson

Each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself. — Storm Jameson

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit. — Storm Jameson

An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him. — Storm Jameson

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable. — Storm Jameson

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve
or to corrupt
civilization, and are obliged to use them. — Storm Jameson

She did not so much cook as assassinate food. — Storm Jameson

Invaders always destroy libraries. — Storm Jameson

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna. — Storm Jameson

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human. — Storm Jameson

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive. — Storm Jameson

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself. — Storm Jameson

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

There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute. — Storm Jameson

Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic? — Storm Jameson

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

I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect. — Storm Jameson

A writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully. — Storm Jameson

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible. — Storm Jameson

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure. — Storm Jameson

The stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another. — Storm Jameson

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton. — Storm Jameson

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself. — Storm Jameson

Happiness comes from the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. — Storm Jameson

One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past ... — Storm Jameson

We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us. — Storm Jameson

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world. — Storm Jameson

War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines. — Storm Jameson

From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike. — Storm Jameson

The sex even in serious pornography has less singularity than the mating of squirrels. — Storm Jameson

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless. — Storm Jameson

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. — Storm Jameson

Giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success. — Storm Jameson

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear. — Storm Jameson

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority. — Storm Jameson

My mind is not suited to go much into company. — Storm Jameson

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him
to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act. — Storm Jameson

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. — Storm Jameson

Language is memory and metaphor. — Storm Jameson

When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after. — Storm Jameson

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma. — Storm Jameson

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. — Storm Jameson

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. — Storm Jameson

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

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

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? — Storm Jameson

A joke is a joke or the image of a truth ... — Storm Jameson

As often as not our whole self ... engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things. — Storm Jameson

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature. — Storm Jameson

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back. — Storm Jameson

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible. — Storm Jameson

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably. — Storm Jameson

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions. — Storm Jameson

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

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it. — Storm Jameson

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. — Storm Jameson

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself
except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence. — Storm Jameson

The whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington
only that they are subdued to the ruling passion. — Storm Jameson

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind. — Storm Jameson

Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited. — Storm Jameson

Truth is the only good and the purest pity ... Men lie for profit or for pity. All lies turn to poison, but a lie that is told for pity or shame breeds such a host of ills that no power on earth can compass their redemption. — Storm Jameson

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

The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me? — Storm Jameson

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow. — Storm Jameson

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

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification. — Storm Jameson

The hunger of the spirit for eternity - as fierce as a starving man's for bread - is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity. — Storm Jameson

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas
on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor
unless he means something else, quite different
is a rogue ... — Storm Jameson

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses ... — Storm Jameson

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? — Storm Jameson

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. — Storm Jameson

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? — Storm Jameson

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees. — Storm Jameson

To grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table. — Storm Jameson

We do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us. — Storm Jameson

In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase. — Storm Jameson

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