Quote

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Stephen Vizinczey

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Stephen Vizinczey
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: May 12
Author
Literary Critic
Writer
Kaloz
Trying
Vain
Portrayed
Way
Boring
Alcoholic
Sort
Alcoholics
Books
Outsiders
Character
Authors
Book
Justify
Writing
Author
Thing
Engaged
Sympathetically

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The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I'd call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America's whole culture-aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn't part of the local atmosphere.
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Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art - but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.
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You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
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All great power has to do to destroy itself is persist in trying to do the impossible.
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Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you
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Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.
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Whenever you hear the word inevitable, watch out! An enemy of humanity has identified himself.
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Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with
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The truth is that our race survived ignorance it is our scientific genius that will do us in.
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Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn’t play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.
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Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great.
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Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents birth
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We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.
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Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.
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Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man's universe is the earth?
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