Es bedeutete: mehr Prüfungen, aber auch da muss ich sagen, ich hab ganz gerne feste Perspektiven, vorhersehbare Paniksituationen, auf die ich meine Ängste konzentrieren kann.
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
I once wrote, in The Information, that an Englishman wouldn't bother to attend a reading even if the author in question was his favorite living writer, and also his long-lost brother — even if the reading was taking place next door.
Viewed at its grandest, P.C. is an attempt to accelerate evolution. To speak truthfully, while that's still okay, everybody is a racist or has racial prejudices. This is because human beings tend to like the similar, the familiar, the familial.
Like all "acts of terrorism" (easily and unsubjectively defined as organised violence against civilians), September 11 was an attack on morality: we felt a general deficit.
This moment was the apotheosis of the postmodern era — the era of images and perceptions.
I think it's the whole impulse to judge and censor and euphemize, that is the enemy.
Only it was much, much worse than that. In fact, words alone cannot adduce how much worse it was than that. September 11 was an attack on words: we felt a general deficit.
I think enlightenment is incremental, and I see it in my children.
For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.
It was explained that the North Korean matter was a diplomatic inconvenience, while Iraq's non-disarmament remained a "crisis". The reason was strategic: even without WMDs, North Korea could inflict a million casualties on its southern neighbour and raze Seoul. Iraq couldn't manage anything on this scale, so you could attack it.
I'd like to be remembered as someone who kept the comic novel going for another generation or so.
And we're not going to do that.
Weirdly, the world suddenly feels bipolar. All over again the west confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ideocratic system which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence.
Philip Larkin, a big, fat, bald librarian at the University of Hull, was unquestionably England's unofficial laureate: our best-loved poet since the war
Ten years later, Larkin is now something like a pariah, or an untouchable.
