[b]V.S. Naipaul
Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.[/b]
Anyone here ever acted in a boom?
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And – though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall-- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.
Like new is always going to be good.
How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!
Sometimes evolving into a religion.
A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he’s got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.
We’ll have to run this by Mr. Reasonable, of course.
…paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer…
As [more and more] the Gods give way to the bottom line.
If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.
He still knows more than the readers.