Storm Jameson Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

Vitality... that dangerous divine gift she had in such abundance, the one gift that no art could counterfeit, and the one the gods give least often and with least wish to be kind.

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

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

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
'I knew you wouldn't mind' is the formula with which my friends begin the confession that they have made use of me in some indefensible way, or written a brutal criticism of my new novel.

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

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

Storm Jameson
Like many quite good medical men he regarded women as mentally deficient and physiologically malformed.

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
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
Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.

Storm Jameson
She disappeared silently — like a cat slipping out of the larder.

Storm Jameson
Her poverty was a hard ulcer in her, and it took all her strength.

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

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

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

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

Storm Jameson
She had an acute ear, and tiny sounds, the shiver of grass on grass in light airs, the squeaking of bats, cries of birds in a distant field, creaking of dried roots, the trickle of rain down the walls of a house, were caught by it, and offered to memory.

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

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

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

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