Cultural Cohesion Quotes

“In a prison state, you should own only what you can carry with you and let your memory be your travel bag.”
― Clive James, Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays

“Tolstoy's novels are about the planet Earth and Solzhenitsyn's are about Pluto. Tolstoy is writing about a society and Solzhenitsyn is writing about the lack of one... surely there is something wilfully unhistorical about being disappointed that Pierre Bezhukov or Andrey Bolkonsky or Natasha Rostov find no equivalents in Cancer Ward. Characterization in such wealthy detail has become, in Solzhenitsyn's Russia, a thing of the past, and to expect it is like expecting the fur-lined brocades and gold-threaded silks of the Florentine Renaissance to crop up in Goya's visions of the horrors of war. Solzhenitsyn's contemporary novels- I mean the novels set in the Soviet Union- are not really concerned with society. They are concerned with what happens after society has been destroyed.”
― Clive James, Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays

“Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.”
― Clive James, Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays