From a Commonplace Book

[Responding to the question why he was not a member of any specific religion:]
Because they all appear to have prohibitions, admonitions and proffered truths which cannot be established as a matter of intellect or natural law, which is reason -- simple reason -- unattended by revelation of faith. Most of them insist that you believe in certain things not because you can prove absolutely that they are so, but because you want to believe in them. Give me a church or a religion that has one principle: Love one another as you love yourself, and I will belong to that church.

-- Abraham Lincoln

From a Commonplace Book

There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness.

-- Clement Greenberg

From a Commonplace Book

When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint; but when I asked why people are poor, they called me a communist.

-- Bishop Don Helder Camara

From a Commonplace Book

My first concern is not for the reader. That would be pandering. My first concern is not for myself. That would be self-indulgent. The writer's first concern should be for the verbal object that's trying to get itself said.

-- William Gass

From a Commonplace Book

Antoninus said to Rabbi, "Why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?" He replied, "Were it reversed, you would ask the same question."

-- Sanhedrin 91b [quoted in Dov Aharoni Fisch, Jews for Nothing, pp. 308 - 309]

From a Commonplace Book

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit... the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution.

-- Igor Stravinsky

From a Commonplace Book

Elements such as magic are labeled fantasy because their vocabulary is not scientific, and because they are placed in vaguely medieval worlds that are not historically connected with our present. Yet time travel is just as magical as turning lead to gold. The distinction is in the history, or the lack of one. Any fantastic motif can be science fiction if a history is even implied that leads from our world to the world of the text. If this history is dispensed with, the text is a fantasy.

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, The Novels of Philip K. Dick, p. 26

From a Commonplace Book

Some men interpret nine memos.

-- Palindrome by William Irvine

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

-- Palindrome (author unknown)

From a Commonplace Book

Three themes of anime: carnival, elegy, armageddon.

-- Seen on the internet; source lost [I read this in an Oubapo posting, more than a decade ago, and copied it.]

From a Commonplace Book

If America ceases to be a free country, you won't necessarily notice. It won't smell different, dark clouds won't gather on the horizon, the roads will remain open, movies will still play in the theaters, and television will, most assuredly, stay on.

Like the mass of people who lived in the Soviet Union, or who are now living in Iran, you'll go about your business, making accommodations, and trying to get by...

We're a long way from a mullacracy in the U.S., but we're definitely closer to being one than we were a few years ago, and, I'll say it again: what's most disturbing is how many people are unperturbed. And what those who are upset should understand is that, contrary to what we think we know in our bones, there aren't many effective arguments from self-interest in favor of freedom. Being free just isn't a matter of convenience, and being unfree isn't necessarily inconvenient. It's a matter of principle, and of pride. I don't think many people care about the principle, but, for a couple of hundred years, Americans have been fiercely, even violently, proud of being free. Are they still?

-- "Ogged" at http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.html#001957

From a Commonplace Book

Since I started doing interviews, I’ve answered the "preaching to the converted" question more than any other. It seems to me predicated on an unthinking use of the terms "preaching" and "converted." It’s not as if all preachers, including for instance John Donne, were merely dispensers of predigested, soundbite rhetoric and cliché; good preachers are gifted articulators of the thorniest, juiciest, most dangerous, most contradictory problems, dilemmas, controversies. It’s not as if the "converted" are always only Moonies lacking any sort of spiritual liveliness or freedom of thought. Quite the contrary. The converted, the congregation, united by certain beliefs, share amongst themselves bewilderment, despair, hope needing amplification, confusion needing examination and elucidation, and avenues of interesting and productive inquiry. Lockstep congregations are a sure sign of a moribund faith, of the absence of anything Divine. A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants to do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this "preaching to the converted" question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

If one’s intended audience is "the unconverted," one is an evangelist. The evangelizing playwright usually makes dreary plays, cautious plays which try to woo and seduce hostile, recalcitrant people, people less enlightened than the playwright — plays of condescension, in other words, plays which arrange their glib, necessarily simplified certainties in neat rows and send them forth, marching into battle. Ugh. That’s a degradation of the power of theater, of the purpose and power of art. As I said, art suggests, describes, explores, tests ideas; art doesn’t issue marching orders. There are far better, more effective ways of organizing people than playwriting. And while art educates, it’s never sufficient as a means of instruction; at some point a more reliable narrative must be sought. Art should strive for a level of complexity and depth that mirrors the complexity and depth of life, and for that matter that mirrors the complexity and depth of politics.

Although there are times when a good, nasty skit is called for.

-- Tony Kushner (NY Times, June 4, 2004, "10 Questions for... Tony Kushner")

From a Commonplace Book

Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. (And not all young people are lucky enough to be young. Think of those people at your college who wanted to be politicians or corporate lawyers, for example.) I'm not talking about the accouterments of youth: the unlined faces, the washboard stomachs, the hair. The young are welcome to all that — what would we do with it anyway? I'm talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invincibility, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated these feelings, and now that I'm older it stimulates them, but either way, rock 'n' roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn't need exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it's only now and again?

-- Nick Hornby (NY Times, 21 May 2004, op-ed page)

In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of "David Copperfield," the novelist David Gates talks about literature hitting "that high-low fork in the road, leading on the one hand toward `Ulysses' and on the other toward `Gone With The Wind,' " and maybe rock music has experienced its own version...

Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, "that high-low fork in the road" is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool — a stranger to all notions of postmodernism — but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well.

-- ibid.

From a Commonplace Book

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

-- Charles de Gaulle

From a Commonplace Book

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

-- Joan Didion

From a Commonplace Book

An excuse uglier than the guilt.

-- Iraqi saying, as quoted on the internet (so take with salt!)

From a Commonplace Book

Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.

-- Sidney Hook

From a Commonplace Book

The only completely consistent people are the dead.

-- Aldous Huxley

From a Commonplace Book

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

-- William Pitt

From a Commonplace Book

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

-- Tacitus

From a Commonplace Book

You say you have a counterexample to my argument, but you must be misunderstanding me, because I did not intend for my argument to have any counterexamples.

-- David Lewis