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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Art is not withheld from anyone. Like Mount Everest, it is there. The slopes are sprinkled with people shouting “Come on up, it’s marvellous!” but…society is not by nature homogeneous…The millions aren’t dissatisfied…What it has got is football, films, telly, bingo and pools—and it likes them very much, thanks.
He tries out a line for Moon: “My aim in life is to read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”
An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. To speak of an art which requires no gift is a contradiction employed by people like yourself who have an artistic bent but no particular skill…Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. In interviews, Stoppard claimed this argument as his own: “Donner is me.”
If I am known for anything I am known for expressing things well, the right words elegantly arranged, but I cannot treat the information as it comes in and send it out wrapped in my elegantly expressed revulsion…the only words I come up with are “They’re pigs.” And so they are. The wives of imprisoned men
“In my opinion, yearning is a necessary part of the soul’s economy. Relationships are all the better for it. In an ideal world more and more people would see less and less of each other.”
Hannah says: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”
“A good sentence added cancels out apprehension and ennui. A good page, a good scene even, on holy days, cancels out the whole voidedness of introspection.”
I’m beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom is what we give each other, not what we take from each other like a fought-over loaf. We balance what we give up against our need for the co-operation of other people…What is the largest number who can pull this trick off? I would say it’s smaller than those utopian communities…I would say the largest number is smaller than three. Two is possible, if there is love, but two is not a guarantee.
Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time.
we have “no consolation to count on but art and the summer lightning of personal happiness.”
A poem can’t be written by an act of will. When the rest of us are trying our hardest to be present, a real poet goes absent. We can watch him in the moment of creation, there he sits with the pen in his hand, not moving. When it moves, we’ve missed it. Where did he go in that moment? The meaning of art lies in the answer to that question.
This is Belinsky from The Coast of Utopia
“Our heart belongs to the outsiders, the madmen, the visionaries, the prophets, the ruffians on the stair who just possibly are coming down from seeing God.”
At one point, during a heated misunderstanding between one of the Belarusians and Index’s legal team, Stoppard calmed everyone down: “Self-justification on either side would merely extend the moment, and is essentially irrelevant. What is required instead is a contest of generosity. From this point on, ladies and gentlemen: empathy, patience, kindness, action, communication—followed by more of the same.” It could sum up his own life’s policy.
“relative instability of truth in history as opposed to the unchallengeable truth of fiction.”
“It’s only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination.”
